DISQUS

Romain · 1 year ago

You're going from Search volume to use volume. Isn't it a lazy shortcut? Do you mean searching ends in using? May be fair, but it seems something missing ...

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

yes, this is very unscientific, as I stated ;-) But I do think the two are correlated.

mwseibel · 1 year ago

Very cool analysis - what do you think about Justin.tv's reach?

http://tinyurl.com/56bbpc

Jesse Farmer · 1 year ago

I know you guys do more than lifecasting these days, but do those numbers correlate with the location of your lifecasters?

Also, where does D.C. go? It's probably lumped with VA rather than MD.

mwseibel · 1 year ago

There are over 100,000 total broadcasters on the site and they attract viewers from all over the world in much the same spread as Youtube (1/3 North America, 1/3 Europe, 1/3 Rest of the World (primarily South America, Near East, and Northern Africa).

Also - Lifecasting is really only a small component of what is being broadcasted now-a-days.

People are using Justin.tv gather a live interactive audience for their realtime video broadcasts.

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

blue state only? ;-)

mwseibel · 1 year ago

<grin>

Jay Cuthrell · 1 year ago

Very cool!

I'm speaking at the Wireless Technology Forum in a few days on the topic of CALEA. This graph will accompany a quote from a CALEA solutions provider "after the May 2007 deadline for compliance things just kind of died down in the market"

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=&q=c...

By comparison, now consider FISA which has enjoyed a fairly big notoriety in media coverage

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=&q=f...

beermann · 1 year ago

I thought it was Twitter's worldwide reach that was really interesting. In addition to showing early adopter locations in the US, this may help determine what types of technologies are popular in different regions of the world. I wonder if Twitter will be mainstream in Japan and Taiwan before it will be in the US.

Jesse Farmer · 1 year ago

As far as Twitter activity goes, Tokyo is #1 with more activity than the next two most active cities (New York and San Francisco) combined. Osaka is #8.

beermann · 1 year ago

And the Japan launch wasn't all that long ago...

Jesse Farmer · 1 year ago

I dare you to write one of these blog posts: "Silicon Valley is a Technology Ghetto" or "Why TechCrunch Doesn't Matter."

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

I double dog dare you ;-)

Marc Hedlund · 1 year ago

Fantastic post, Andrew.

Skygtq · 1 year ago

Great tool, but I'm missing "Europe" as a selectable location. For us here, it's not so interesting to dig within our countries, the differences between European countries are at least as exciting as the comparisons between the US states!

Is there any way to provide that as feedback?

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

thanks! Glad you liked it. Hope you're doing well, and it was good to see you at Foo

Bryan · 1 year ago

Andrew, great post. Jesse has a great idea though; either of those would drive a ton of traffic and you'd have a good point. Startups focus way too much on Techcrunch.

Shawn K · 1 year ago

It's a good thing I live in North Dakota, putting us on the map by myself.

Amber S · 1 year ago

Wow, now I feel like the only person outside of Cali using netvibes.

PJ · 1 year ago

Digg's spread across the nation is a bit of a surprise. I expected Digg's map to be more like Twitter or even worse.

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

Yep, Digg is doing surprisingly well...

ChrisG - Art Director · 1 year ago

Digg is used by college kids, Twitter is used by marketing geeks. Totally different demographic.

UltimateFootballNetwork · 1 year ago

Wow. Techcrunch's data is a little surprising.

Zero volume in places like NYC/Boston/Austin/Boulder/Chicago? I'm a big believer in the "echo chamber" problem but this seems a little extreme.

evgen · 1 year ago

This sort of analysis is a short step up from reading goat entrails. A breakdown on search terms is not even close to an actual traffic analysis. For fun I decided to compare the real numbers of the site I work for (large, unnamed online news service) with its google insight geographic breakdown. Google searches on the company name mostly came from appalachia. Real geoip correlated server logs show that less than 5% of our domestic hits came from the top four states Google listed. None of these states were in the top ten when compared to the real traffic numbers.

To be honest, you would be better off throwing darts at a map than to use this as an actual analysis technique.

UltimateFootballNetwork · 1 year ago

Now THAT is some interesting data.

It seems as though we're a ways off from consistent, reliable web traffic analysis tools.

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

great points - thanks for the comment and analysis.

Jeremiah Owyang · 1 year ago

I concur with evgen, this is just conclusive of search terms. Wouldn't real early adopters know the URL?

Sorry, but you can't draw real conclusions from this data about early adopters, or real site usage.

Perhaps a better interpretation would be "most common search terms by region", you could then draw some loose correlations about queries and intent --but certainly not usage, visitors or adoption.

Keep up the good thinking!

lawrence · 1 year ago

Andrew, thanks for pointing out the tool - it certainly has a bunch of neat applications. But I'm not sure if an early adopter would ever do a search for "TechCrunch.com" on Google. Or any other site. In my experience, it's ONLY the AOL crowd that uses Google searches as a proxy for typing in domains.

More interesting to me is the Taqueria heat map below which shows Texas beating out California. Ouch!

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=&q=t...

nitinbadjatia · 1 year ago

Funny, I was just about to make a similar point...searching for popular sites is usually left to the nomadic AOL tribe. I'm sure that accounts for a lot of the YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace phenomena. Of course the outlier here is TechCrunch, which I doubt the AOL nomads have ever heard of.

davemc500hats · 1 year ago

andrew: to really inform this analysis, i think you need to baseline for normal population density in those geographic territories (& probably online/broadband penetration too, but that's a second order issue within the US... tho very relevant outside US).

for example: the "hole" in Montana, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming is likely just due to very small populations / low population density overall (also note Arkansas -- where my stepfather lives -- and West Virginia -- my home state & where most of my family lives -- are also "holes"... and i'm not just making a cultural statement ;)

altho tough to do, if you baseline for normal pop / density then i think you'd see more interesting trend data relative to "available market" in each of those areas.

still pretty amazing analysis you're doing here... applause, applause!

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

I think there's some normalization happening already... just try searching for "jenna jameson" on google insights and you'll get Montana and Wyoming to light up fine. Same for "adultfriendfinder" - I'm just using the fun queries of course, but there are other ones which work also.

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

here's a wikipedia-sourced map of population... seems like it explains why CA/NY/TX/FL are often the first couple states that come up

lawrence · 1 year ago

Andrew, here's an interesting one - how about a search for "widgets" - California, New York, and Mass are 2,3,4 with a somewhat surprising outlier of Utah as #1. As opposed to trying to deduce early adopter sites, maybe going after to the terms associated with early adopter sites is more revealing.... "lifestreaming, newsfeed, rss, api, etc, etc, etc"

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=&q=w...

Freddy Mini · 1 year ago

Linking searching for a name and using it is a bit of a stretch for me. so if I search for Cuil, i'm a Cuil user?

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

I noticed your netvibes email - this version "netvibes" not "netvibes.com" is certainly much nicer of a view: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=&q=n...

I think in particular with netvibes that since it's a start page, perhaps people don't search for it much.

Andrew Chen · 1 year ago

The previous company I was at handled a lot of search logs from the portals... almost all the top queries were navigational in nature, and so I do think that usage correlates with searches, especially aggregate across a state.

Here's cuil's stats:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=&q=c...

Davide · 1 year ago

Very nice analysis.
However It is possible that people that do not usually use these Sites have to search the proper URL.
Web 2.0 sites that are adopted as day-by-day tools do not require to be searched on google.
So actually maintstream could be in light blue...

filsa · 1 year ago

very interesting study. I wonder what it would look like for Europe. Unfortunately you can't choice Europe at Google Insights as the continent.

billyshipp · 1 year ago

This was super useful. Thanks for posting this. I'm interpreting the results more as where people are hearing about a topic instead of actual use. For example strong search results in Texas means that people in Texas are hearing about a site and Googling it.

philmang · 1 year ago

I think that the search term breakdown might well be more representative of offline buzz than early adopters. Someone hears about twitter from a friend, co-worker or news source, and goes on Google to search for more about it. So the places where Twitter has buzz and news coverage are also the places that show up on the insights map. A combo results search might provide better insight—perhaps "Twitter" and "new marketing tools" or "social media" would cross reference a certain amount of this data—even better if you could cross reference w/ Google News results.

SEO/SEM blog · 1 year ago

Thats a really cool analysis giving a glimpse at user behavior patterns. Here is pingdom network popularity analysis http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=336
Thanks for your time putting your analysis together, its very interesting.

Craig · 1 year ago

Check out searches for Mccain, Obama and Palin.

Intersting finds.....Alaska has been searching like CRAZY for Palin....as has...IRAQ!?

Nirose · 1 year ago

Thats interesting

Nirose · 1 year ago

Google analytics is free and awesome

PuReWebDev · 1 year ago

This new Google Insight search makes it easier to narrow down keywords for niche marketing. I'm sold already. Much better then the standard Google trends tool.