We all are pretty well aware that Google is big. But how big? New data shows that Google now accounts for an astounding 25% of all consumer Internet traffic in North America.
That is a much bigger chunk than we thought. This means that with so many smart phones and tablets and PCs connecting, Google is bigger than Facebook, Instagram and Neflix – combined. It also tells us why Google is building new data centers left and right. Keep in mind that in 2010, Google accounted for a mere 6% of Internet traffic.
According to expert Craig Labovitz at Deepfield, an Internet monitoring firm, what is key is how Google has grown in only the last year throughout all of the continent. Deepfield research shows that more than 60% of smart phones, laptops and tablets go to Google at least one time per day.
Labovitz terms Google’s traffic as nothing less than astounding. Most of the traffic does come from YouTube, but Google’s traffic also involves much search, web apps, analytics and advertising.
To deal with all of this huge growth, Google, which is getting into the smart phone business with its new Moto X phone, is building data centers and thousands of servers are going online. The servers store the most popular and sought content, such as a YouTube video that goes viral, or a hot app for Android. These are actually Google cache servers that hold the most in demand content, rather than having it served from the main data center. This helps Google to serve up in demand pages faster
Google does not like to talk about its Global Cache Servers, but obviously it is doing some rather amazing things with them. Rather than just building data centers, they are installing servers close to large ISPs all over the country. It will be most interesting to see what Google tries next!