Three nations, one language - but what about their search interests?

Stephen Withers
Friday, 22 August 2008 07:52

Opinion and Analysis

Everyone knows that people use search engines to hunt down porn ahead of everything else, right? Wrong, according to Google Insights. But there are some interesting similarities and differences among the search interests of American, Australian and British Googlers.

Before we get to the differences, let's take care of the similarities.

The top ten lists of each of the three countries are as follows:

For Australia, games, youtube, myspace, google, ebay, facebook, hotmail, yahoo, weather, and real estate.

In the UK, it's bbc, facebook, youtube, ebay, games, weather, hotmail, bebo, yahoo, and google.

Searchers in the US were concerned with myspace, yahoo, youtube, weather, google, ebay, craigslist, you tube, mapquest and facebook.

Notice the incidence of domain names such as google and youtube in all three lists? I have two theories about that. One is that it reflects how easy it is to accidently type a URL into a browser's search box rather than the URL box. That would explain why there are so many heavily-trafficed domain names in each list.

Facebook appears on all three lists, as do Youtube, google, yahoo and eay, but myspace dips out in the UK and is supplanted by bebo, which is relatively popular there.

What other explanations are there? Please read on.