And lo, we did decide to make a Christmas search engine quiz as a festive alternative to a serious blog post. The answers are at the bottom of the page but if you are tempted to cheat – remember Santa is watching!

Do post your score below and let’s see who the festive experts (festperts? No, that sounds really wrong) are! Can you get all 15?

1) In order to use Google, how old must a person be?
a) 16
b) Old enough to legally agree a binding contract in the country of use
c) 18

2) In the first 6 months of the year, how much money did the IAB state was spent marketing online?
a) £1.7 billion
b) £3 billion
c) £1.2 billion

3) The first Google doodle was to show the company’s employees were attending what event?
a) The Burning Man festival
b) Chinese New Year at Las Vegas
c) The GenCon role-playing event

4) How many unique users does MSN say Live Search have?
a) More than 20 million
b) More than 30 million
c) More than 40 million

5) What does Yahoo! stand for?
a) Nothing, it was dictated by domain name availability
b) Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle
c) Yang Avails Himself Of Opportunity

6) According to ComScore’s most recent figures, the three websites most visited by Britons are Google properties, Microsoft properties and then what?
a) eBay
b) Yahoo! sites
c) Facebook

7) According to the engine, how many searches are made using Yahoo each month?
a) 2.4 billion
b) 5.2 billion
c) 1.3 billion

8 ) What is the UK minimum cost per click offered by Google?
a) £0.01
b) £0.05
c) £0.10

9) How many pages does Cuil claim to search?
a) Four times as many as Google and 12 times as many as Microsoft
b) Three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft
c) At least 15 times more than any other engine

10) Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s first search engine was called what?
a) FindIt
b) SSE (Stanford Search Engine)
c) BackRub

11) What is the name of Econsultancy’s editor-in-chief?
a) Chris Lake
b) Ashley Friedlein
c) Jill Whalen

12) In what year did MSN Search become Live Search?
a) 2005
b) 2006
c) 2007

13) Baidu is a hugely successful Chinese search portal but what is it named after?
a) The wife of the company’s chairman Robin Li
b) The sixth ruler of the Mongol empire’s Ilkhanate division in Iran
c) A poem written more than 800 years ago during the Song Dynasty

14) Before search engines, there was just a list of webservers. Who edited that list?
a) Daddy of the internet Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee
b) A series of US military officials
c) Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau

15) Google recently purchased a pot-bellied pig as a mascot for the Mountain View office. His name is Al Gore, not after the politician, but as a shortening of Algorithm.
a) True
b) False

Answers: 1b, 2a, 3a, 4c, 5b, 6b, 7a, 8a, 9b, 10c, 11a, 12b, 13c, 14a, 15b