Henry Copeland ( via Instapundit ) comments that Google has been claiming "more than 150 million searches a day" for nearly two years, and he speculates as to why the number has not been updated. Maybe Google is more interested in other metrics (like revenue). Maybe Google is growing more slowly than (say) ebay, or maybe Google is doing spectacularly and they don't want their competitors to know and/or they want to make a spectacular announcement just before their IPO. (In the comments, a poster suggests that a fourth possibility is that they have improved their algorithms, the average number of searches per user has dropped, and they don't want their competitors to know this).

My impression of Google, is that three years ago it had been discovered only by hard core geeks, two years ago it was being used by all power users, one year ago it was the standard search tool for most people but secretaries and the like were sometimes still using other search engines, and that today its use is utterly universal. I find possibilities one and two to be inconceivable, and four to be pretty unlikely, as even if it is true, the overall usage would be growing much faster than the reduction due to better efficiency.

This does make you wonder what Google is up to.