MeshTube

There’s been a lot of talk about how big Facebook has become, and with its 600 million users (!) it has certainly become a force to be reckoned with. But there is still one player out there that dwarfs Facebook, and that is Google.

Many of us use Google services each day but very few of us ask the question, "How BIG is Google?" Obviously this question cannot be answered directly, however, the sheer size of Google can be realised by the hard facts and figures shown in this short film.

Google.com, the world’s most visited website according to Alexa.

The company has localized Google Search for virtually every country out there. There are 180+ localized versions of Google, all with their own domain.

Google has 90% of the search engine market on the desktop according to StatCounter.

Then we have mobile search, where Google dominates completely. It’s the default search engine for most smartphones, including Apple’s iPhone and Google’s own Android. Google’s market share here is a whopping 97%.

How many users does Google Search as a whole have?

There are about 2 billion Internet users in total, more than 1.5 billion even if you subtract China, which Google currently has a somewhat rocky relationship with. Would it be unrealistic to say that Google Search has at least a billion users if you count the entire Internet? We don’t think so.

But Google is more than search.

Although hard numbers can be hard to come by, here are some of Google’s major services and

The world’s largest online video service. The YouTube website alone has 500 million visitors per month. Also, 82% of all embedded videos on blogs are YouTube videos (although that last number is from a couple of years ago).

Blogger is one of the world’s largest blogging platforms. Its blogs collectively had more than 400 million readers in 2010.

Orkut was Google’s first foray into social networks, and still its most successful. It has more than 100 million active users worldwide. Actually, if you count daily visitors to the website, Orkut is second only to Facebook (although a far second), largely thanks to Orkut’s very active user base in Brazil and India.

Aside from being the most widely used map service on the Web and incorporated with a ton of different web services, it’s also the dominating map service used on smartphones. Apple uses Google Maps for iOS, and Android is heavily integrated with Google’s products in general, including maps.

Google’s email service is estimated to have around 200 million users.

Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar, and the other web apps under the Google Apps umbrella (which also includes Gmail) are increasingly popular. We haven’t seen any user numbers, but they are bound to be significant.

Google’s Android OS is the world’s fastest-growing smartphone platform with 350,000new devices activated per day (over 10 million per month). Android very much acts as a platform for Google’s other properties, like maps, email, search, etc.

Google’s web browser is gaining market share rapidly in spite of having been available just a few years. According to StatCounter, it currently has 17% of the web browser market.

Google has so many different services that it’s hard to get a grip on them all. To the ones we’ve already listed, we’d like to quickly add a few more: