True, False, or Useful: '15% of all Google searches have never been searched before.'

This factoid is often presented as suggesting something especially impressive and credit- or forgiveness-worthy about Google, which it doesn’t actually support on its own. The statistic alone simply indicates that a portion of daily searches are unique to Google’s logs of prior searches. The statistic alone doesn’t provide insight into the number, diversity, or complexity of the new queries. Facts like these are often used to create—articulate—a certain image or perception. Without context or additional data, such statistics can be misleading or give an inflated sense of a company’s capabilities or achievements.

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In-context, from Google:

Here is Ben Gomes (writing for Google), closing his writeup on “Our latest quality improvements for Search” on Apr 25, 2017²:

There are trillions of searches on Google every year. In fact, 15 percent of searches we see every day are new—which means there’s always more work for us to do to present people with the best answers to their queries from a wide variety of legitimate sources. While our search results will never be perfect, we’re as committed as always to preserving your trust and to ensuring our products continue to be useful for everyone. [emphasis added]

Or this from Pandu Nayak (writing for Google), starting his writeup on “Understanding searches better than ever before” (with BERT) on Oct 25, 2019:

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the 15 years working on Google Search, it’s that people’s curiosity is endless. We see billions of searches every day, and 15 percent of those queries are ones we haven’t seen before–so we’ve built ways to return results for queries we can’t anticipate. [emphasis added]