Technology Network

It's official. India is a Google lover.       We say this as a recent report by digital world research firm comScore shows that Google usage is more prevalent in the emerging Internet markets of India and Brazil as compared to the rest of the world.

      In July, 29.8 percent of total time spent online in Brazil was spent on Google Sites, with India only slightly lower at 28.9 percent. The next highest global market was Ireland at 15.9 percent. Here, we are not talking just about Google search but the other diverse websites falling under Google's umbrella. These include Orkut, YouTube and Google Maps.

      In India, Google Sites accounted for 88.4 percent of all searches conducted, and had a commanding share of time spent in social networking with Orkut (68.2 percent), maps with Google Maps (63.9 percent), multimedia with YouTube (82.8 percent). It also commanded slightly less than half of all time spent in the blogs category with Blogger (47.6 percent) and email with Gmail (46.8 percent).

      In Brazil, Google Sites accounts for 89.5 percent of all searches conducted, while Google's community website Orkut has a dominant position in social networking (96.0 percent of time spent), as does Google Maps in the maps category (70.9 percent of time spent) and Google-owned YouTube in the multimedia category (91.6 percent).

      If you are wondering how the trends marked in these two diverse, culturally different countries are so similar, look what Alex Banks, managing director of comScore Latin America, has to say. "As it turns out, there are interesting similarities between Brazil and India as emerging Internet markets. Google's prevalence in these markets can perhaps best be explained by the fact that the time at which these markets really began to develop and flourish was around the same time that Google was becoming a major player in the search landscape. As a result, Google became the dominant Internet brand in these markets and its success appears to have bled from search into other areas of the web like social networking," Banks noted.