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