Tim Worstall

It is all obvious or trivial except…

 

 

Checking search volumes

June 21st, 2009 · 5 Comments

I may or may not be taking part in a new little project soon. However, before I do so I just want to try and get a sense of the size of the market.

I’ve seen that Google’s total search volume (US only) appears to be 10 billion a month.

Yahoo’s volume is 10% of that, or 1 billion a month (again, US only).

Now, Yahoo buzz gives us numbers for the portions of their searches which are for a particular subject.

More precisely, each point is equal to 0.001% of users searching on Yahoo! on a given day. For example, a buzz score of 500 for “Pokemon” translates to 0.5% of all users searching on Yahoo!

OK, so what does a score of (say) 500 actually mean in total numbers of searches on Yahoo? In a day?

1,000,000,000/30×0.001×500 isn’t it?

Ah, no, (1,000,000,000/30)x.01x.001×500, yes?

The extra x.01 for percent.

Or 166,000 searches for that term on Yahoo that day?

Or if it scales up to Google (which it doesn’t I know, people search for different things on different engines but to get an idea of scale) some 1.5 million searches for that term on Google in a day?

Is that about right? To an order of magnitude, at least?

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5 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Matthew // Jun 21, 2009 at 1:25 pm

    I’m not sure Tim. Isn’t it what % of users searched, not necessarily the % of searches, e.g. I do about 50 searches a day I guess, and if say the average is 10, that might mean your calculations are 10 times too high??

  • 2 Pamela // Jun 21, 2009 at 2:22 pm

    just a sec while I take my socks off………..

  • 3 Tim Almond // Jun 21, 2009 at 4:05 pm

    I really doubt that only 500 people are searching for “Pokemon” every day considering the amount of Pokemon crap that’s sold.

  • 4 Matthew // Jun 21, 2009 at 4:25 pm

    IT’s 500 buzz points, so 166,000 users

  • 5 Charlieman // Jun 21, 2009 at 5:40 pm

    Do Google provide anything useful:
    http://www.google.com/trends

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