Have you ever stopped to think about how big Google actually is? Probably not, but think about it this way, Google accounts for about 25% of all consumer internet traffic in North America on an average day. This means that Google really is a force to be reckoned with, because Google is bigger than Facebook, Netflix, and Instagram combined. Google is busy building data centers as fast as possible, mainly to keep up, as the company accounted for roughly 6% of the Internet’s traffic three years ago.
How Big is Google?
Deepfield, the company that put all of this data together explains just how pervasive Google has become. The founder of Deepfield, Craig Labovitz says that “more than 62 percent of the smartphones, laptops, video streamers, and other devices that tap into the Internet from North America, connect to Google at least once a day."
This is astounding not only to us, but to Labovitz as well. Obviously, most of the traffic is coming from YouTube, but Google also has major traffic from analytics, web apps, and advertising.
It goes without saying that nobody is able to get a total picture of the entire Internet, therefore Deepfield’s numbers are coming from a guess based on traffic that flows through its Internet service provider partners. With that said Google is huge, and only getting bigger.
Google is getting so big that it now has data centers on four continents. Of course this is garnering a lot of attention. At the same time Google has been busy adding thousand of servers to ISPs around the world. They are doing this so they can serve data, videos, apps, etc from a local ISP data center instead of streaming it from a Google data center. Labovitz says the servers were in just a few North American ISPs three years ago. Today, they’re in 80 percent of them. For some reason Google will not comment on their Google Global Cache servers and the ISPs aren’t allowed to talk about them either.
All of this moving into the local ISPs by Google is expected to push companies like Apple and Facebook to do the same. Not only will that continue to happen, but also data centers are still being built everywhere. What does this mean for the average user? Probably nothing at this point, but maybe faster speeds, and who knows why else they are doing it. Contact an expert at Leap Clixx today to learn more about ranking your site well on the giant that is known as Google.
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