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"Google Insights" Reveals the Day-to-Day Intimacies of US Soldiers in Iraq
According to this tool, the relative volume of searches for many word combinations such as "Christmas gifts" or "Valentine’s gifts" is surprisingly higher in Iraq than in countries such as the United States and Great Britain. |
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 Regional interest for "anniversay gifts" in 2008 |
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The approximately 140,000 US army soldiers living in Iraq comprise the great majority of that country’s web surfers. They are also very active users because they spend a great deal of their free time surfing the web.
Google Insights is a tool devised by Google that calculates the relative volume of searches for a certain phrase or word and also determines the most popular searches for a given country.
Thanks to this tool, anyone can confirm that "Christmas gifts", "gift shop", and "Valentine's gifts" are some of the most searched-for terms in Iraq. It’s not surprising that, being so far from home, these surfer’s most frequent searches should have to do with special occasions and gifts for their loved ones, in fact, in relative terms, more searches are made for the words "anniversary gifts" in Iraq than in the United States. Search "anniversary gifts" in Google Insights.
This tool also displays a graphic chart showing "regional interest" for a given key work, a relative scale for which the maximum value is 100. For instance, for the words "Christmas gifts" the value for English-speaking countries was as follows: 80 for the United States, 55 for Ireland, 58 for Great Britain, and 31 for Australia. In Iraq, Google Insight, gave the term a value of 100. View results
What Web Sites Do American Soldiers Visit the Most?
AKO (Army Knowledge Online), a United States army corporate Intranet site that provides the military with various tools appears in first place. The site allows users to manage permits, medical attention, travel, legal information, etc. It also includes a proprietary web mail system that is widely used for internal communications.
MyPay, another military web site that allows soldiers to receive their wages, pay taxes and manage their pension funds, is the third most visited web site after Yahoo.
Internet in Iraq
According to various sources, Internet penetration among the Iraqi population is somewhere between 0.2% and 1% (the penetration rate for neighboring Iran is 34%). That is to say, in Iraq, a country with a population of 30 million inhabitants, there are approximately 54,000 Internet users. It’s surprising that the volume of users in Iraq is less than the number of United States soldiers stationed in the country.
The only two Arabic words that appear in the country’s top 10 search terms are: صور and اغاني. These two search terms mean: photos and songs.
This study has been carried out by the Marketing Department at Curiosite.com, a web site based in Spain and specialized in original gifts and gadgets. The study arose from our research into the consumption patterns of clients from the United States.
Sources
Google Insights
Army Knowledge Online Wikipedia
MyPay
Internet World Stats
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