Picasaweb popularity by country

Still investigating the popularity of Picasaweb, I thought about looking into which countries (or strictly which TLD's) are responsible for the most links to Picasaweb.  My findings were initially surprising to say the least.

All numbers were obtained by doing a search for "picasaweb.google.com" together with "site:tld" - all done at the main google.com site.

For reference, without specifying a TLD gives 412000 results.  (Remember, these numbers are always an estimate - but [probably] - see the conclusion, good enough for our purposes).

• com 278000
• org 32400
• net 18800
• nl 15700
• tw 11000
• pl 593
• cn 433
• ru 386
• de 322
• fr 305
• jp 239
• uk 208
• ca 202
• info 182
• us 76
• edu 154
• dk 133
• it 130
• no 115
• il 104
• be 104
• se 99
• br 99
• au 87
• cc 72
• at 65
• es 54
• ch 42
• biz 42
• ie 25

So, links from .com domains dominate as expected, with healthy showing from .org and .net domains.

The first countries to show up are a real surprise - the Netherlands and Taiwan, and in fact they are the only ones with a significant presence that I found.  (Normally you would expect the UK, Japan and Germany to top the country rankings here).

Next in fact, but massively behind the two top countries are Poland, China and Russia, and it is only after those that you get back to something closer to expectations, with Germany, France, Japan, UK and Canada occupying the next few spots.

What can explain this strange set of results?  Perhaps the Dutch have taken to Picasaweb in a big way, much as Brazil has made Orkut its own.  I' dont know - I'll certainly be trying to delve more into these figures - and to see if I can back them up with further results.

Some comparative figures searching at Yahoo are:

• [all] 31941 (yes, that's less than other figures!)
• com 88000
• net 11200
• org 10800
• tw 2890
• pl 1050
• nl 994
• cn 933
• ca 597
• de 515
• uk 452
• ru 367
• fr 290
• jp 196

The disparity here is not as pronounced, but it still shows Taiwan, Poland, Netherlands and China ahead of the more usual high rankers of Canada, Germany, UK and Japan.

Live.com has the following:

• (all) 14635 (yes, again less than later figures!)
• com 29605
• org 1587
• net 1381
• ru 460
• uk 367
• cn 318
• nl 308
• de 267
• jp 195
• ca 174
• pl 166
• tw 138
• fr 97

These figures are much closer to the expected ranking - its beginning to look as if Google has been misled.

Returning to the Google results for nl, paging through the results shows that after just 128 entries, Google gives up and says that the rest of the results have been omitted.  Choosing to display those explains a lot - it looks as if the nl result numbers have been inflated by forum spam - there are lots of results from various threads all at the same forum site.  In general Google is better than the other search engines in indexing dynamic pages (such as forums often produce), and that seems to have affected the numbers in the initial estimates.  Taiwan also gives up after displaying just 140 results. Oh well, maybe the Google numbers are not "good enough for our purposes" after all.

So the general conclusion to be taken from this is that the majority of (link) support for Picasaweb actually comes from the regular .com, .org, and .net domains - corresponding to a lot of American users, and widespread support from early adopters around the world who use the .com domain as its worldwide meaning.

[A useful paper on estimating size of search engine indexes, and explaining some of their biases is Random Sampling from a Search Engine’s Corpus].