What data actually exists about this industry, who typically holds it, at what granularity, and how obtainable it is. Public means openly published; purchasable is sold by a vendor; partnership needs a bilateral deal; exclusive is effectively locked up by one party.
| Data category | Who holds it | Granularity | Access |
|---|---|---|---|
| registry/licensing/permits | EU Commission (DSA designations of very large online search engines), national telecom/media regulators, company registries; app-store… | Per designated service / per legal entity, event-based | public |
| energy consumption | Operators of the data centres behind search indexing (Google, Microsoft, Baidu) via sustainability reports; grid operators and utilities… | Annual company total and PUE; per-datacentre where disclosed; grid… | public |
| financial filings | Listed operators (Alphabet, Microsoft, Baidu, Yandex/Nebius successors) via SEC/EDGAR and national registries; subsidiary accounts in… | Quarterly and annual segment revenue (search advertising), per legal entity | public |
| incident/safety/claims | Portal operators (copyright/right-to-be-forgotten and government removal request logs, e.g. Google/Microsoft transparency reports); data… | Per request/URL; aggregated semi-annual by country and requester type | public |
| waste & emissions | Operators' ESG/sustainability reporting (CDP disclosures, CSRD reports); e-waste/hardware recycling contractors | Annual Scope 1/2/3 per company, occasionally per region | public |
| quality & compliance testing | Portal operators' trust & safety teams; EU DSA transparency database and audit reports; independent researchers running search-result audits | Per content removal/demotion decision; aggregated per-country… | public |
| pricing | Search ad platforms (Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising); third-party SEO/PPC vendors (Semrush, Ahrefs, Similarweb) that model keyword CPCs… | Per keyword / match type / geo / device, daily average CPC and bid estimates | purchasable |
| employment & workforce | Operators' HR systems; public sources such as US H-1B/PERM disclosure files, filings headcount, LinkedIn-derived vendors (Revelio, Live… | Per job posting / per visa filing; annual headcount aggregates; per-role… | purchasable |
| reviews & sentiment | Search portals operating local/business listing surfaces (Google Business Profile, Yandex, Baidu); scraping and reputation-management… | Per review (business, rating, text, timestamp) | purchasable |
| production output | Portal operators (crawl volume, index size, query volume); third-party estimators (Similarweb, Comscore, StatCounter for search engine… | Daily/monthly query volumes and index/crawl counts internally; monthly… | purchasable |
| customer demographics | Search portal operators (audience/affinity segments); measurement panels (Comscore, Nielsen, Similarweb) selling estimated audience profiles | Aggregated cohorts by age/gender/interest/geo, monthly; panel-level per-user | purchasable |
| geospatial/movement | Search portal operators with map/local search products (Google, Baidu, Yandex); location-data brokers reselling SDK-derived signals | Per device location ping / per local-search session; aggregated to place-level… | partnership |
| communications/marketing performance | Portal operators (Search Console, Ads reporting), advertisers and SEO/analytics vendors; publishers holding their own impression/click/CTR… | Per query-page-site, daily; per campaign/ad group | partnership |
| transactional/sales | Search portal operators (Google/Alphabet, Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo via partners) and their ad-billing systems… | Per ad impression/click/auction, aggregated to per-campaign daily billing | exclusive |
Compiled by the TriData research system from public registers, industry structure and regulatory reporting obligations; refreshed as the underlying catalogue grows. Look up the code itself in the NACE code finder.