3 ms·

It would still be helpful to know what ‘new’ means. Does it mean literally the text string typed into the box by the user is new? Or does it mean the text str

• FalconSensei 6y ago
  > Does it mean literally the text string typed into the box by the user is new? I guess that could be the case. Many could be related to things that are on the news. Like, 'the cw powerpuff girls' for the new show that was announced. No one was searching for that until the announcement, probably
  • zepto 6y ago
    Right - but without clarification from Google, we really don’t know what it means.
• jjk166 6y ago
  At the lower bound, that's 150 Billion "new" searches per year. There are approximately 50,000 unique english words not including names or misspellings. If google searches were on average for 3 words, it would take 833 years at that rate to go through all the combinations. Alternatively, if we assume that google has already recorded 20 Trillion unique search queries (~ 1 Trillion new ones per year for 20 years), the odds that a query composed of 3 correctly spelled english words that are not names has been seen before is 1.6%. Even if we restrict queries to those using the most common 1000 words, there's a 50/50 chance of a query composed of 4 words being unique. Of course people do not just type random words into the search bar and some terms will be searched many thousands or even millions of times, but still if anything the fact that 85% of searches aren't unique seems surprising.