Arbor: Google Commands Big Slice Of Global Internet Traffic

Clint Boulton eWEEK USA 2012. Ziff Davis Enterprise Inc. All Rights Reserved,

A new study has found that Google and its various services controls more than 6 percent of all Internet traffic around the world

Google wields some 6.4 percent of all Internet traffic around the world, a finding that should do little to quell concerns by consumer advocates that the search engine has grown too large.

It’s well known that Google has for years cultivated a 65 percent share of search in the United States, with more overseas.

Quantification

But few have tried to quantify the company’s overall footprint on the web, which includes the snaking tendrils of dozens of web services such as YouTube, Google Apps and other products.

Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at traffic-watching security firm Arbor Networks, crunched some numbers and found that Google grabbed more than 1 percent of all Internet traffic share since January.

Moreover, if Google were an ISP, it would rank as the second largest carrier on the planet. Arbor’s data about Google, rendered in this chart, comes from 110 ISPs who participated in the poll.

Google enjoys an average 6.4 percent of all Internet traffic, but the number balloons to between 8 percent and 12 percent when Arbor adds estimates of traffic offloaded by Google’s Global Cache deployments and Google edge-peering with consumer networks.

Google is growing faster than overall Internet volumes, which are already increasing 40 percent to 45 percent each year.

Google dominance

The Arbor report came a week after Royal Pingdom collected figures from around the web to show how large a slice of market pie Google has in search, mobile search, search advertising and video media, among other categories.

“Try surfing the web without touching a single Google service,” said Royal Pingdom. “It’s impossible.”

Google hopes to extend its purview online as it seeks to leverage artificial intelligence for serendipitous discovery in the future.

This experimentation involves tuning Google’s search algorithm to personalise results per individual taste and recommend them to users.

The inception of such technology will greatly concern privacy advocates who already fear the company collects too much data on its 1 billion searchers and hundreds of millions of users of its other web services.