A nation's interests? Google tells all

A nation's interests? Google tells all - Google Trends, national trends, India - Business - International Herald Tribune

oogle 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.

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."

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.

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.

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."