How Well Do You Know Google?

We all know that Google dominates when it comes to online search advertising, but some new statistics about the world's largest search engine may well surprise you.

In 2010, Google generated some $29 billion in revenues, the great majority (97 per cent) of which comes from advertising and search engine marketing. According to research by Kantar Media, a division of worldwide ad agency WPP, the biggest Global search spenders are IAC/Interactive Corp, which many of us could have forgiven for not having heard of, they own ask and match and a number of other brands. The other big spenders are brands familiar to all, Amazon, for example, is estimated to have spent some $118 million on search in the first nine months of 2011, which of course does not include the major ad spending around Christmas. Travel aggregator Expedia spent over $92 million, whilst Microsoft, one of Google's key competitors, spent over $70 million.

As well as the data on who are the top advertisers, other new data from BusinessMBA also shows how Google puts the competition in the shade. For example, the most expensive keyword categories are thought to be "insurance", "loans" and "mortgage", bad news for financial services' marketing budgets.

The most impressive figure is the suggestion that Google receives 1 billion unique visitors a month. That's one seventh of the entire worlds' population using Google in a month, each spending around 200 minutes on the search engine, an average of around seven minutes every day.