Well, what do we have here? It’s a shiny new tool from Google to play with! In an attempt to make an easy-to-use interface to search for quick facts in one place, Google quietly launched a collection of data from third party sources called Internet Stats on the Google UK domain. Here’s what it looks like:
At first, I found it to be kind of confusing as to exactly what you’re supposed to do. I typed “SEO” into the search box, hit “Search all” and the page came up blank. I took this to mean that there are no statistics in the data collection yet for “SEO” (and I would assume that this would be an appropriate search term since this tool is for “industry facts and insights”). A search for “social media”, however, did return a stat from eMarketer: “Social media use has taken off in the UK. eMarketer estimates that 39% of UK Internet users – more than 15.4 million people – will use social networks at least once per month in 2009.”
Since this tool is on the UK domain, it’s a bit UK and Western Europe centric, but there are some statistics that cover the global territory, like “20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute” (from YouTube). You can also enjoy reading various facts by clicking on the “Random Statistic” at the top. If have information that you think should be added to the collection, there is a link to do so on the bottom right (Google’s research team verifies all submitted facts before adding them to the collection).
Unfortunately, for the time being, this is a UK-only initiative and there are no current plans to launch this tool in the US (or other countries). For me, it’s a tool that I would use mostly just to read the interesting facts. However, if I wanted some quick stats for a client proposal, this would be a good place to start.
And if that doesn’t thrill you, maybe the fact that the search box on the Google homepage is bigger will.
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