Mark – afraid you're being misleading about search activity. Of all online activities, #1 is still email, but search is #2 and 59% of Internet users use search daily (or many times per day).

The statistic you're quoting from is share of TIME spent online:

- 40% communication
- 5% search
- 40% content
- 17% commerce

It seems odd to think that search could ever dominate share of "Time" spent online, since it's basically a service that's designed to be quick and unobtrusive.

The statistic that's meaningful to your argument is that currently 20% of Internet users don't use it frequently and 41% of users don't yet use search daily.

Rand, I think mark is right with this statement "Search currently represents only 5% of online activity."

Not sure where you are getting "59% of Internet users use search daily (or many times per day). "

59% is whopping amount for search activity -even if its once per day. With approx 1.3B users online per 24 hrs cycle, this wold make it approx 560M searchs per day, if we take even 10% of the that 560M with 2 search per day, this will make search engines chrun at approx 1.2B seach terms per day.

I think that assumption is certianly flawed as GYM will be on overload mode with this number of searchs per day--or it can be broken down into Per hr or per minute and then we can do the CPU thin slices to figure out resource allocations. This will indicate if the resoruces are avialble for service provisioning of X number of Search items.