Google Trends allowing one to sort through several years of Google search queries from around the world to get a general idea of everything from user preferences on ice-cream flavors to the relative popularity of politicians in their respective cities or countries.
It's incredible that a small country like Singapore appears on top for so many search terms... For example, just take `Honda Odyssey' as a search term, and you see Singapore beating the USA in frequency of searches. Just click here: http://www.google.com/trends?q=honda+odyssey
Horrific embarassment too... the answer to `Who searches the word `fuck' most?' turns out to be Iran! http://www.google.com/trends?q=fuck&ctab=1&date=all&geo=all
More revelations! Pakistanis, Egyptians and Iranians seem to be most interested in `SEX', Australians are most interested in `Porn', India, Iran and Singapore are most interested in `nanotechnology', Hong Kong and Singapore are tops with `Nikon', and India and Singapore are neck to neck tops for searching `Microsoft'.
Note that all the above, is not a percentage, but true blue absolute numbers of searches from the countries mentioned. It's crazy how Singapore with merely 4.5 million people can actually reach the top for some terms. For Nikon, I would think that Singapore being one of the few trans-shipment point for cameras in the world, Nikon would arguably be greatly searched for, but the search term `Microsoft' - wow, that boggles the mind.
Possibly, Singaporeans now might be the MOST ONLINE PEOPLE in the world who use English as their search language of choice. Certainly, this phenomenon deserves more study.
EDIT: It's now clear what's happened. After numerous posts in the forums from irate users who were getting confusing results, Google put a footnote in the search results. http://www.google.com/trends/about.html#4
Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for your term coming from each
city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city.
Means that my statement `Note that all the above, is not a percentage, but true blue absolute numbers of searches from the countries mentioned' is totally wrong. Might be that Google will let us have the absolute numbers thing in the future. So now we know that it IS a ratio, it IS a percentage. And our perceptions have to vary as such.
Seems sensible. Ratios are informative as to the interest of the countries. Now, it merely seems that Singaporeans, each of them, do use Google a lot and hit it with lots of search terms.
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