SearchResearch hit 5 million reads!

[Dan Russell]

SearchResearch hit 5 million reads!

When I started writing... 

P/C Dalle-3. I tried to show 5M people, but that's a bit too much...

... SearchResearch back in 2010, I wasn't sure how many people would be interested in reading about the fine details of online research.  It was unclear how many folks would want to spend part of each week learning how to Search-by-Image, or use some obscure Google Maps function, or even how to use online dictionaries to find just the right word. 

But here we are, 14 years, 1,402 posts and 14,050 comments later.  

More impressively, we just clicked over on our 5-millionth online reader!  I know that some number of those reads are by bots, but if each reader spent (on average) 1 minute / read, that's a total of 28.5 years of people reading SRS for 8 hours / day.  

FWIW, I know this is a pretty serious undercount of human read-time--SRS is syndicated in a couple of different places that I know about, and I see copies of the posts all over the place that are unofficial reposts.  I don't have data for all of those.  

But for just the SearchResearch posts you see here on Blogger, the data looks like this: 

There are a few fun spikes in the data (such as that spike in Feb, 2024, when we had 91K readers in a single week when I wrote a piece about AI and search).  But in general, SRS has around 1,000 readers each day, averaging around 32K / month.  

And, for those of you who remember the PowersearchWithGoogle MOOC (our online class, still available at edX).. the last time I checked the numbers there, we had around 5M students take that course, so there's clearly a demand for this kind of knowledge.   

 

FWIW, the accumulated watch time of those videos was greater than 400 years of total watching!  It's frightening to consider that my talking head has been on someone's YouTube screen for more than 400 years of 24 hours Dan-talking-about-search each day.  

My thanks go to all of you for dropping by and checking out the latest in online research methods.  Who knew that we'd be quite so large a community!  

Many more thanks to our regular contributors.  You know who you are, and I'm grateful for all of you.  

As we say... 

Keep searching! 

(Or as we used to say, "Search on!")  

-- Dan 

--

Daniel M. Russell 

Check out my new book:  The Joy of Search (MIT Press, Winter, 2019) 

Available in fine bookstores (and online) everywhere.