Back in June, Google+ landed with splash in the social network swimming pool, spraying water right in Facebook’s eyes. Judging by the mostly positive buzz so far, it’s arguably one of Google’s most successful product launches ever.
We know there are plenty of early adopters and techies on Google+, mostly males (the term “sausage fest” has been thrown around). But where has Google+ captured the imagination of people the most? Where are people the most interested in this new social network?
One metric to judge interest in a service is through search statistics (ironically via Google), which is what we’ll look at here with the help of Google’s Insights for Search tool. Essentially, we’re using one Google service to measure interest in another Google service.
No point in waiting, let’s get right to the data.
Top regions sorted by interest in Google+
- Taiwan
- Hong Kong
- Nepal
- India
- Paraguay
- Norway
- Honduras
- Bangladesh
- Indonesia
- Guatemala
Of note is that six of these are in Asia, three in Latin America. We find it interesting that Norway shows up (our neighbor, we’re Swedes). In fact, Google+ may actually be doing really well in Scandinavia, as you’ll see later in this post.
Top cities sorted by interest in Google+
- Nei-Hu, Taiwan
(a Taipei district, so maybe this should be Taipei)
- Hong Kong, Hong Kong
- Bangalore, India
- New Delhi, India
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Mexico City, Mexico
- New York, United States
- London, United Kingdom
(Yes, we know the list only has eight cities. That’s all we got from Google’s tool.)
Again, the majority of these (five out of eight) are in Asia. The only entry from Latin America is Mexico City.
Another Google tool, slightly different results
Interestingly, the same analysis done on Google Trends gives similar but not identical results to using Google Insights for Search. Either Google is using slightly different algorithms or different data sets for the two. The overall trend is clear, though, with a strong interest shown in several regions of Asia.
However, since the results are somewhat different, we’ll include the lists here as well. (And if anyone knows which of the two tools is the most accurate, let us know!)
Top regions according to Google Trends
- Taiwan
- Hong Kong
- India
- Norway
- Indonesia
- Philippines
- Finland
- Denmark
- China
- Austria
Note here that all of a sudden we have three Scandinavian countries in the top ten (and a total of four from Europe). Asia still dominates, though.
Top cities according to Google Trends
- Nei-Hu, Taiwan
- Hong Kong, Hong Kong
- Bangalore, India
- Pune, India
- Mumbai, India
- Jakarta, Indonesia
- New Delhi, India
- Singapore, Singapore
- Mexico City, Mexico
- Bangkok, Thailand
Another slight divergence, making the Asian dominance even stronger here. Nine out of ten of these cities are in Asia.
Final words
If we wanted to be mean we would have titled this article, “Who are the most interested in Google+? Not even Google knows for sure!”
We love that Google provides these tools for analyzing search data. They’re both useful and fun. However, it’s a bit frustrating when you get inconsistent results with two search trend tools from the same service (Google). The top results are the same, but after that they start to diverge. It might be a side effect of Google+ not having been around for too long yet, so the amount of data that Google can sample is somewhat limited, but still… It’s annoying.
So, anyway, to answer our initial question: If you live in Taiwan, especially in Taipei, you’re in the company of an unusually high proportion of people who have some form of interest in Google+.
Data and image sources: Google Trends and Google Insights for Search. Note that all data is normalized.
