In 2012, Google received over 2 million search queries per minute. Fast forward to 2014 and that number has more than doubled. Today, Google receives over 4 million search queries per minute from the 2.4 billion strong global internet population.That's just one statistic that tells the story of the data explosion that we're living through.

In 2012, DOMO created an infographic that showed how much data is generated every minute, and in 2014, the Data Never Sleeps 2.0 infographic was published with all of the latest stats.

You can see the 2014 infographic at the end of this article. Below are some key pieces of data that might surprise you.‍

Every minute:

• Facebook users share nearly 2.5 million pieces of content.
• Twitter users tweet nearly 300,000 times.
• Instagram users post nearly 220,000 new photos.
• YouTube users upload 72 hours of new video content.
• Apple users download nearly 50,000 apps.
• Email users send over 200 million messages.
• Amazon generates over $80,000 in online sales.

The Cost of Content Clutter

Last year, Newstex published the Cost of Content Clutter infographic, which puts a dollar value to the data explosion for content publishers. Think of it this way---five exabytes of content were created between the birth of the world and 2003. In 2013, 5 exabytes of content were created each day. All of that data comes with a cost. In 2013, content searches cost companies over $14,000 per worker and nearly 500 hours per worker.

The Google Factor

Google plays a big role in helping people find online content and data, and it's growth was visualized in the Amazing Facts Google infographic from Promodo last year. For example, did you know that Google processes 20 petabytes of information per day. Using the same comparison from the Cost of Content Clutter infographic, think of it this way---all of the written works of mankind created since the beginning of recorded history in all languages equals 50 petabytes of information.

The Growth of WordPress

When it comes to user-generated content outside of social media sites, WordPress plays a big role in the world of blogging and content management. The WordPress a Global Phenomenon infographic from Yoast reported that over 72 million websites were built with WordPress in 2012. By January 2014, that number climbed to over 86 million.

The History of the Internet

The internet debuted in 1984 when it linked 1,000 hosts at university and corporate labs. According to The Incredible Growth of Web Usage infographic from WhoIsHostingThis.com, it took 15 years for the internet to grow to 50 million users in 1998. Eleven years later, in 2009, there were 1 billion internet users around the world. Three years later, it doubled to over 2.1 billion users, and by 2013, 39% of the world's population was using the internet (2.7 billion people). The Internet Then and Now infographic from WhoIsHostingThis.com provides some more information about the data explosion. In 2013, nearly 4 billion hours of online video were watched each month. Even more interesting, people watched over 500 years of YouTube videos on Facebook every day and 1 billion YouTube videos on mobile devices every day.You can follow the links above to view each of the infographics and get all of the statistics related to the data explosion. Also, check out the 2014 infographic from DOMO below to see how much data is currently generated every minute.

Image: Erik Fitzpatrick licensed CC BY 2.0