i was just digging around when i found this interesting piece of news which said that google gets 12 cents for every search we do, yes that's right every time you hit the enter or click on the search button with google search, they earn 12 cents in revenue.

i am not talking about the adsense, i am talking about the normal search we do. 

what's 12 cents to google, but in january alone american users alone accounted for 2.7 billion searches in january 2006 alone according to neilson / netratings.now does that ring a bell, well yes if you take in account the whole world then you can figure out that google is making a pretty tidy amount from user's like us using their search engines.

according to the analysts gooogle accounted for an estimated 48% of the total 5.7 billion searches done by americans in january 2006 which is also yoy (year on year) 39% higher than those that were done in january 2005.

"web users are conducting more searches not because they can't find what they're looking for," said ken cassar of nielsen/netratings, "but because search as a utility has become deeply ingrained into people's everyday lives."

no wonder the search giants are splurging so much on buying out smaller companies. well i feel that the 12 cents they get when i hit the search button is justified, what with i getting accurate results from billions of pages is something that i wouldn't be able to do with out the help of search engines.

 what do you think about it?

you can read the entire article on bbc uk .