How Many Searches Do You Do in a Month? (Shallow Thoughts)

How Many Searches Do You Do in a Month?

Michael Kennedy asked whether people are using search engines less because of AI chatbots.

I haven't really gotten into using AI chatbots as coding assistants, so I'm not one to say. But it did make me wonder how many searches I do. Michael saw a stat that people average fewer than 300 searches per month; he thought that was absurdly low until he checked his own stats and found he'd only made 211 searches so far in March. (Of course, March isn't over yet. He didn't give a search number for a complete month.)

He also didn't mention how he got that number. A few years ago, I wrote about Exploring your Search History in Firefox, but my searchhistory.py doesn't list dates. The sqlite3 query I reference in that post fetches dates:

$ cp ~.mozilla/firefox/PROFILEDIR/places.sqlite /tmp/
$ sqlite3 /tmp/places.sqlite
sqlite> SELECT url, last_visit_date FROM moz_places WHERE url like '%https://www.google.com/search?q=%';

fetches dates, but they come out like 1742947138745915. That looks too big to be a Unix timestamp, and indeed it is:

$- python                                                              ~
Python 3.13.2 (main, Mar 13 2025, 14:29:07) [GCC 14.2.0] on linux
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.fromtimestamp(1742947138745915)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<python-input-3>", line 1, in <module>
    datetime.fromtimestamp(1742947138745915)
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
ValueError: year 55233766 is out of range

Apparently they're in microseconds, where Unix time is in seconds, so just move six decimal places:

>>> datetime.fromtimestamp(1742947138.745915)
datetime.datetime(2025, 3, 25, 17, 58, 58, 745915)

So I modified searchhistory.py to print the time, then counted how many there were for March 2025:

$ src/scripts/searchhistory.py ~/.mozilla/firefox/masterprofile/places.sqlite | grep 2025-03 | wc -l
79

Only 79 searches so far in March? That is vastly less than I expected. I tried for February: 84. How about March of last year? 21. I tried various other years and months, and the numbers were all pretty comparable.

I have the feeling that I lean very heavily on web searches, especially when coding. But apparently I don't do anywhere near as many as I thought. Or else Firefox isn't saving everything, which is of course a possibility. Next time I find myself fruitlessly searching for something, trying lots of different sets of search terms, I'll make a point of running searchhistory.py afterward, to see if it captured all my attempts.

Tags: tech, firefox, web, python, google, sqlite
[ 16:07 Mar 26, 2025    More tech | permalink to this entry | ]