No question — Google’s the world’s most popular search engine. But half of those billions of queries it handles comes from Google partners, rather than searches at Google directly.
That tidbit came today from Nikesh Arora, senior vice president and chief business officer for Google, when he was talking with Liz Gannes of AllThingsD at the Dive Into Media conference.
It’s not a figure I recall seeing out there before. Perhaps it is, and I’ve missed it. But it’s interesting nonetheless.
Specifically, Arora said that of all the search queries that Google handles, about half of those are done at Google itself — people coming to Google.com, Google.co.uk, using a search box on a mobile device that send the query directly to Google and so on. I reconfirmed this with him shortly after his session.
The other half comes from Google partners, anything from its deal to power searches at AOL to searches that happen through Safari on iOS, because of Google’s deal with Apple.
Arora also said that he expects about 50% of advertising to move online in the next three to five years.
As for advertisers who feel they’re losing control with the new Enhanced Campaigns from AdWords, sorry, Arora didn’t suggest there would be any changes or pullback.
Postscript: While Google isn’t saying the stat above is incorrect, it did contact me with this further clarification about the revenues earned by Google’s own sites versus those earned from Google partners:
Nikesh intended to say that Network revenue is a large percentage (approximately 40%) of Sites revenue, numbers we disclose every quarter in our regulatory filings.
Below, our live blogging of the session:
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