Long ago I heard somewhere that half of all the searches done on Google every day were brand new – Google had never (ever never ever) seen them before. I’ve repeated that stat a lot over the last two or three years, never having been able to attribute the source.

So imagine my pleasure and surprise to find a brand new reference to Udi Manber, Google's VP of Engineering saying that “20 to 25% of the queries that Google sees today, have never seen before.”

Wow. It doesn’t even matter that the number is ‘only’ 25% - a few years later it would have to be lower – that is an amazing number. Google does between 2 and 10 billion searches per month. It’s been at that for several years now. And every day those slippery humans ask for 50 million or more things that nobody has ever thought to ask about in that exact way before. Wow.

I’m not exactly sure what this means for search marketing, other than showing that along with the algorithms and the competition and the way results are grouped and presented the actual inventory is a moving target as well. In paid search ‘broad’ and ‘phrase’ match probably take care of most of these new searches (or at least those in your area of interest). For organic optimization it certainly favors the ongoing development and growth of content – the larger the site and the richer the language the better the odds of having an exact match of all or part of these new search phrases.

What do you think it means?