Google dominates internet landscape in India and Brazil: comScore

According to a study released by comScore, Inc, an internet measuring firm,  one out of 10 minutes spent by a person on the internet is spent on a Google-run site.

The study, focusing on Google's relative dominance in the two emerging internet markets of India and Brazil, also ranked Google Sites as the most visited internet property worldwide with 854 million unique visitors aged 15 and older in July, an increase of 18-per cent during the past year. Nearly 75 per cent of all Internet users worldwide visited Google Sites, which also accounted for 9.4 per cent of all time spent online.

Google usage is more prevalent in certain global markets than others. Two particular markets stand apart from the rest in terms of their dependence on Google: Brazil and India. In July, 29.8 per cent 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 per cent.

''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,'' said Alex Banks, managing director of comScore, Latin America.

The Google brand has extended to success across most of the categories in which it plays in Brazil and India. In some categories, Google is the only player of consequence, commanding considerably high market shares. For example, in Brazil, Google Sites accounts for 89.5 percent of all searches conducted, while Google Orkut has a dominant position in social networking (96.0 per cent of time spent), as does Google Maps in the maps category (70.9 per cent of time spent) and Google-owned YouTube in the multimedia category (91.6 per cent).

In India, Google Sites 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), 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).