Statistically speaking

Recently, a number of high-profile search engine companies complied with the Chinese government’s demands and began filtering out so-called inappropriate results. To get an idea of how vast these search engines are, let’s look at their statistics for last year.

Estimated searches per day in the U.S.: Yahoo — 42 million AOL — 93 million Google — 112 million

Estimated annual search engine usage (in hours): MSN — 4.9 million Yahoo — 5.4 million Google — 13 million

Most popular searches of 2005: Yahoo — “Britney Spears” AOL — “Lottery” Google — “Myspace”