What the world is looking for, as it happens. Each point of light is about a thousand searches.
The pulse. Google handles more than 5 trillion searches a year, about 158,000 a second. Each point of light stands for roughly a thousand of them. The rate is an estimate from Google's own published total, not a live count.
The geography. Points rise from where each language is spoken, brighter where it is daytime and dimmer where people are asleep. The pale band is the sunlit side of the Earth, moving with the real clock.
The white sparks. About 15% of searches each day have never been made before. They appear as white sparks among the coloured ones.
The words. In this preview the words are a fixed set of everyday questions in each language. When the page runs on its own server, the words are the Wikipedia articles people are reading most in each language, and an unusual surge gathers into a brighter knot.