Africa and Google Search or Burkina Faso's Assault on the Internet

Two recurring themes on this Yuppie blog include Africa and Google. I use Google Analytics and Google Earth almost every day. I also think about traveling to Africa each and every day.

A few weeks back I created a map that displayed the number of tweet mentions per African country per million residents. I found it quite fascinating.

This post is similar but instead of tweets it simply compares the number of pages a Google search will find for each country (in millions). This number can be found at the top of any google search.

I...hypothesized that there would be a big discrepancy in what I expected to be the big dogs such as South Africa and Egypt and the lesser known countries like Equatorial Guinea or Eritrea (which I swear NOBODY seems to know about despite the conflict in and around the area).

Well, I was half right. SA and Egypt came in at number one and three respectively. Number two in our countdown, however, is the biggest of several unexpected placements.

Burkina Faso? Seriously? Now, there were a few unintuitive results I half expected (haha- how can you half expect something :) whether it be Chad placing high because it's also a name or Somalia's search results being inflated because of the American twenty-something's fascination with pirates, Guinea, being part of Guinea Pig certainly would rank high- What I'm getting at is that I knew there would be some surprises but I wasn't expecting this many.

I thought and thought about why Burkina Faso would be so high. I looked at the first few pages of results hoping for a clue but nothing. I thought to look at the google adwords that popped up on the side: Burkina Faso Pictures, Burkina Faso Girls and Burkina Faso, Trip Advisor. After seeing the second result I thought perhaps Burkina Faso was the new Russia when it came to mail order brides...I don't think that's it though. So I ask you, please help me solve the mystery of Burkina Faso in Google Searches. WHY?!

I know google can be sensitive to location and your own search history. I wouldn't think that the number of results found would change from place to place as I'm pretty sure that number would remain relatively static but if you find anything different than what I have, I encourage you to comment and let me know (cause this sort of thing really fascinates me for some reason).

In the map below the countries towards the red end of the spectrum have the highest number of search results whereas the green end of the spectrum indicates fewer google search results. I've included the full list of countries and the number of results in millions below the map.

I was also surprised to see Zimbabwe second to last. For a country that has been in the news a LOT in the last couple years, it sure doesn't have a big presence on the internet, er...I mean Google. The internet is much more than Google....right? :) Ethiopia was much lower than expected too.

I was surprised to see Burundi have more search results than Rwanda, and Mali! Mali is another place nobody seems to know about. I'd venture a guess that more American's have heard of Timbuktu than Mali. Although Timbuktu only has just over 2 million hits on a google search.

And here is our map:



South Africa 214
Burkina Faso 182
Egypt 166
Mali 135
Nigeria 123
Kenya 118
Guinea 113
Angola 110
Congo (Kinshasa) 105
Congo (Brazzaville) 105
Madagascar 104
Ghana 103
Sudan 98.7
Togo 98.1
Morocco 96.8
Chad 94.8
Senegal 92.6
Botswana 91.2
Malawi 89.7
Uganda 89.3
Tunisia 88.8
Sierra Leone 88.6
Algeria 87.2
Mauritius 87
Tanzania 87
Seychelles 86.7
Burundi 86.7
Liberia 85
Namibia 84.9
Gabon 84.9
Lesotho 84.7
Mozambique 81.9
Somalia 80.8
Benin 79.5
Zambia 79.1
Rwanda 77.5
Libya 76.7
Gambia 76.4
Cape Verde 76.3
Guinea-Bissau 75.1
Eritrea 72.7
Djibouti 72.1
Mauritania 72
Swaziland 71.9
Ethiopia 71.7
Central African Republic 70.8
Cameroon 66.4
Comoros 65.7
Western Sahara 57.3
Equatorial Guinea 57.1
Sao Tome and Principe 38.9
Côte d'Ivoire 30.5
Zimbabwe 21.3
Niger 15.7

Tracking your blog readers old and new

My love for Google continues to grow. Sure they are Big Brother but when they provide the services they do, it seems worth it.

In my perusing (I MUST stop using that word so much), I come across a ton of features, widgets, add-ons and tools and when I find one I think you can't live without, I let you know.

I just started using Google Analytics which is a tool to help web developers and bloggers keep track of their visitors and their stats. I also use feedburner (Google owned- go figure) whose feed flare provides lots of stats but Google Analytics provides even more information and has it organized in an intuitive manner than only Google can pull off. A simple copy and paste of a code snippet is all you need to be tracking everything you want to know about your visitors. It's like google is letting you be big brother to all your visitors, allowing you to target your content (sound familiar).

It will even integrate with your Adords account (how convenient).

So for all you beginner and novice bloggers out there. Get a Goolge account and start using Google Analytics.

Let me know what you think.

MLK day

Well, its another 3 day weekend for me. When you get about 40 days off per year they are bound to come with relative frequency. I wasn't able to do anything too exciting this weekend so I'm really going to focus on relaxing today.

Saturday was pizza at my moms to celebrate my sisters birthday and yesterday was spent sick with Amy. She had a sore throat, I just felt queezy for the second half of the day. Since that was the case it was really nice not to have to get up and go to work this morning. In stead I get to chase after Samson all day while Amy is at work in the D.

I bought the Google Sketch up for dummies book at Barnes and Noble (BKS) yesterday. Aside from it just looking cool I would love to be proficient enough at it to use it at work. While an interest in learning as much as one can about the profession may not be a marketable quality at work, knowing how to do little things like Google SketchUp always seem to impress. Any time there is a free software or programming tools available I am tempted to learn about them. Thats why I have an HTML book (really is that easy) and a Ruby programming book (not as easy as I was expecting).

So hopefully I'll find a "Mythbusters" marathon on tv. If not I've got two full seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation to choose from!

I starter another blog where I am beginning to "collect" funny/amazing youtube videos. In addition to dropping by at my youtube blog, if you have any good videos, please share them by leaving me a comment on that blog. I hope you'll get a laugh when you go there.

Google is Big Brother

The multi billion dollar global giant knows more about you than you think and it will soon know more.

Google first became an incorporated business in 1998. (GOOG) was first publicly traded in 2004 and has been a stock sensation ever sense, more than sextupling its price per share. It's truly amazing how far the company has grown in ten years. Google is the true epitome of success for an internet company and has become the standard by which all other search engines and for the most part web companies are measured.

In fact, for a web company to succeed, being indexed by Google is essential and without adequate indexing a web company is doomed to failure. Google utilizes what it calls "crawlers". These crawlers constantly surf the net looking for new and updated information and that information is then indexed into the results you get each time you Google your own name. Even the name Google has turned into a verb.

There is no question Google has made many lives easier, created jobs and brought the farthest reaches of the internet to the doorstep of anyone with a computer but at what cost?

Google is scooping up fledgling internet companies like a wangdoodle scoops up oompa loompas for breakfast (pat on the back for that analogy). Lets look at some of some of Google's acquisitions.

Picasa
Youtube
Panomario
Feedburner
Pyra Labs (Blogger)
Keyhole Inc. (Google Earth)

There are about 40 more significant acquisitions not even mentioned.

How does Google know so much about us? Well, there is gmail, so they know who we are friends with. Panoramio and Keyhole help them know where we go, where we want to go and what pictures we take when we go there. The Google search engine keeps track of your web statistics; what sites you visit, how often you go there, how often you go there during work. Blogger lets them know what interests us and our opinions. You get the picture. They even use us to get to know more about each other which then funnels right back to them. Talk about targeted marketing!

If you haven't done it already I would encourage you to enable google's web statistics, you can do so easily from your google homepage after you have created account, which you've already done if you have a blogger blog, or an adsense account. Check back on your statistics after a week or so. You'll feel all dirty inside knowing Google has you in its sights 24 hours a day. While tools->internet options -> clear history might help cover your tracks at work, Google still knows. If you don't have a Google account, sign up for one.

If you think the government knows to much about you, think about who knows even more about you.