Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

Google Search in the United States could run over USB (sort of)

Google Search USBThat Google is dominating the search industry is not exactly news. According to Nielsen/Netratings there were approximately 3 billion searches made in the U.S. on google.com in December 2006.

Though traffic estimates should always be taken with a grain of salt, we decided to make some simplified calculations based on this to see how much bandwidth the Google Search page is using. Just for fun. First we calculated the size of an average Google Search results page, and added it to the size of the google.com start page. Together they make up the data delivered by Google for one search query on their homepage, which turns out to be 39891 bytes.

If we simply take this number and multiply it with the Nielsen/Netratings number, we get 121,093,797,747,000 bytes, or just over 110 terabytes of data delivered by searches on google.com in the U.S. in December 2006. That translates to more than 3.5 terabytes a day.

So how much bandwidth is needed for that? Crunching the numbers reveals that a sustained 362 Mbit/s would be enough. That can be compared with a regular high-speed USB connection which has a theoretical throughput of 480 Mbit/s. Imagine that, running the entire U.S. Google Search over USB…

Please note that this is a very simplified calculation. We have not taken any caching, TCP/IP packet overhead or POST data into account. We have also ignored the fact that some queries are made directly on the search results page, all to simplify the calculations.

However, simplified calculations aside, it’s interesting that the bandwidth number isn’t higher, and it certainly shouldn’t pose a problem for a company with Google’s resources. The conclusion would be that the big resource hog for Google Search is backend processing, not bandwidth.

Side note

This bandwidth is for searches made in the U.S. on Google.com. Google delivers a lot more search results via embedded search functionality in websites, toolbars, and so on, not to mention the rest of the world and all the data the Googlebot pulls in as it spiders the Web. The actual bandwidth for all Google Search activity is most likely several magnitudes higher than the number we arrived at in this article. Add to that the different services such as Gmail, Orkut, Blogger, Google Video, YouTube, etc, and bandwidth demands should go through the roof. It still stands, however, that for the Google Search page alone, bandwidth isn’t the main resource problem.

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Can gzip Compression Really Improve Web Performance?

Last updated: February 26, 2024 The size of the web is slowly growing. Over [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free