<incom> A nation's interests? Google tells all

[manse jacobi]

A nation's interests? Google tells all

By Anand Giridharadas International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, MAY 13, 2006

MUMBAI, India Google lifted the veil this week on one of its best- 
kept secrets: which nations search for what.

Who looks up democracy most avidly? Who seeks out Allah or Christ  
most faithfully? Who types in "drugs" or "sex" most frequently?

No country's secrets are spared.

Pakistanis look up "Danish cartoons" more avidly than anyone,  
according to Google. They also lead the rankings for "sex" - with  
their neighbor and nuclear rival India seldom far behind.

"In Pakistani society, sex is a taboo," said Fatima Idrees, a project  
manager at the Pakistani affiliate of the Gallup International  
polling agency, adding that "curiosity and availability of the  
Internet may cause such behavior."

The site introduced Thursday, Google Trends, measures how often  
particular phrases are searched for from computers in individual  
countries and cities. It short-lists the places with the highest  
absolute number of searches for, say, "cat food." Then it picks the  
top 10 or so based on which places look up "cat food" much more than  
they do other things - for instance, "dog food."

The Google Trends site is likely to generate a mix of consternation,  
embarrassment and laughter around the world. While Google emphasizes  
that its efforts to protect individuals' privacy, the new site does  
nothing to protect the collective privacy of nations, if such a thing  
exists - the right of the British to conceal that they look up  
"handcuffs" most often, or the right of China's leaders to hide that  
Mandarin ranks second only to English as the language used to look up  
"democracy," or the right of other officials to hide that Arabic- 
speaking users rarely look up "democracy."

"This is a fascinating project, effortlessly offering a glimpse into  
regional and cultural habits and differences that is otherwise nearly  
impossible to reproduce," said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of  
Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University.

"This sort of feature reminds us that the Internet is global, yet not  
one undifferentiated mass," he added. "Such measurement may help us  
understand the origin and movement of ideas as they sweep regions and  
the world."

The Google rankings also generate a new kind of interest-level rating  
for politicians - as for countries, brands or anything else people  
look up. Now, the most vain (and most regularly searched) among us  
can check how many people are looking us up, where they are from -  
and, most important, whether they search more for us or for our rivals.

In India, suspicions that Sonia Gandhi is the power behind the throne  
of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appear to be buttressed by search  
results. As the leader of India's governing Congress Party, Gandhi  
gets about 50 percent more searches from Indian users than Singh does.

French users, meanwhile, shed light on France's power struggles.  
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy draws as many searches on his own  
as his rivals, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique  
de Villepin, combined.

For politicians with sagging poll numbers, Google's index might be  
some consolation: it records how often people look you up, not  
whether they love you. To bring Machiavelli's famous formulation into  
the age of Web surfing, it may be better for a prince - or president  
or prime minister - to be searched than loved, if he cannot be both.

President George W. Bush commands at least seven times as many  
searches in Russia as its own leader, Vladimir Putin. Among the  
French, Bush generates about 50 percent more look-ups than Chirac;  
among Iranians, Bush is searched twice as often as the Iranian  
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Not everything on the site is a surprise. People in Boston and  
Minneapolis and in Halifax, Nova Scotia, lead the search for  
"mittens." Dubliners top the list in "Guinness" searches. When it  
comes to looking up "dowry," surfers in Pakistan and India are clear  
leaders.

Other findings are quirkier, and at times to difficult to explain.

Even though homosexuality is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, the  
kingdom ranks No. 2 for searches for "gay sex," behind the Philippines.

And consider the list of cities that most frequently look up "amour,"  
the French word for love. Paris, allegedly a romantic haven, is  
absent from the top 10. The top three berths went to Rabat, Morocco;  
Algiers and Tunis.

Other findings suggest the stirrings of a trend. Searchers for  
"Allah" come overwhelmingly from the Islamic world. But, in a sign of  
shifting social realities, the word is searched from the Dutch- 
language version of Google more avidly than from the Arabic-language  
one. Norwegian, French, Danish, Swedish and German sites also  
featured in the top 10 for "Allah" inquiries.

"Guns" is a word easy to associate with the United States. But the  
rising incidence of violent kidnappings and murders in Latin America  
has perhaps driven searchers to the Web for answers. Buenos Aires  
leads the cities index for "guns" searches, and Argentina as a whole  
outranks the United States, with Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru  
also in the top 10.

The Google system can also be queried one country at a time, to  
determine, for example, how frequently people in Afghanistan, Iran,  
Iraq and Saudi Arabia are looking up "democracy." The Bush  
administration is unlikely to be pleased by Google's reply for each  
of those countries: "Your terms - democracy - do not have enough  
search volume to show graphs."