If I can prise you away from Google for just one moment, did you know that we now do nearly 23 million web searches in the UK every day? That's almost one million per hour, nearly 16,000 every minute or, if you insist, 264 internet queries every second. Whoever comes up with the answers must be worked off their feet!
That's an awful lot of questions, and makes me wonder what we did before Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com and the rest came along to rescue us from our ignorance. Presumably we occasionally got to leave our desks and look something up in the library, or maybe we picked up the telephone and talked to someone. And how tiresome was that?
Our infatuation with internet search engines shows no sign of slowing down just yet. According to the good people of Nielsen//NetRatings, some 706m searches were undertaken in the UK in August this year, up 30 million on six months before.
Over half a billion - 546m - results were clicked on (click-throughs, in the parlance), 18% up on six months ago.
Google is as dominant as ever, with 68% of the click through market in August, up 2.8% since February 2006. Its nearest competitor, Yahoo!, is trailing way behind with just 9.1% of the market, with Ask.com in third place with 7.8%.
Alas, no statistics are available for how many of these queries were actually worth asking, or how many of the answers added to the sum total of human knowledge. I would guess about one in 10 of them, with far too many of them comprising the likes of "Lindsay Lohan", "Big Brother winner" and "What was Phil Collins' first solo number one?"
And yes, I did use Google eight times to write the last six paragraphs.
Top 10 search engines
1 Google, 68% share of UK click-throughs, August 2006, up 2.8% since Feb '06 2 Yahoo!, 9.1%, up 0.1% 3 Ask.com, 7.8%, down 0.8% 4 MSN/Windows Live, 5.8%, down 1.1% 5 AOL 4.1%, down 1% 6 Orange 1.8%, up 0.2% 7 May Way/My Web, 1.3%, up0.3% 8 Tiscali, 1.2%, down 0.1% 9 AltaVista, 0.2%, down 0.2% 10 Dogpile, 0.1%, unchanged
