So it doesn’t come as a huge surprise to us when ComScore says that Google and its product constitute an amazing 28.9 per cent of the share of total time that Indians spend online. Apparently, of the total 21,799 minutes that Indians (aged over 15) spent on the Internet (at work or home) in July 2009, 6,294 of those were used on navigating Google sites.

 

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

 

The one disappointment for Google would be the fact that its photo-sharing service Picasa has simply not taken off in India, with it accounting for a mere 16.2 per cent.

 

Out of all the statistics, the only one which caught us off guard was how dominant Orkut was. We had no doubt that it would be the market leader, but the amount of share it has is staggering, considering how few people we know who prefer it to Facebook now.

 

Apart from India, only Brazil shares such high Google usage, with it topping the list at 29.8 per cent of all Internet usage in that country.

 

So why is Google so popular in these two emerging economies? ComScore has a possible explanation. 

 

“As it turns out, there are interesting similarities between Brazil and India as emerging Internet markets,” Alex Banks, managing director of comScore Latin America. “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.”