Nigeria’s Top Searches for 2008 on Google Insights
Today is the last day of 2008, and this is probably my last post for the year 2008. While Google has released its 2008 Year-End Google Zeitgeist for top searches, I noticed that Nigerian top searches for 2008 were not available. This makes me wonder…
- Could this have been an error of omission by Google?
- Or does it mean that Nigeria’s search terms were not relevant enough for Google’s Zeitgeist?
My curiosity led me to discover Nigeria’s top searches for 2008 via Google Insights for Search.
From the search, I found that the term ‘nigeria’ was number one on the list of top 10 search terms, followed by ‘1.4 lite’,‘yahoo’, ‘management’ (hmm, management???). That’s strange! Then, the search term ‘google’ was number 5, followed by ‘yahoomail.com’ and ‘yahoomail’.
The term ‘nokia’ was on 8th position, while ‘job’ and ‘games’ where on 9th and 10th positions respectively. I also noticed that the term ‘nokia’ has been on 6th position in the last 90 days, which means that more people use nokia in Nigeria compared to other mobile phones. I then checked search terms related to ‘nokia’ and found that people mostly used terms such as ‘nokia phones’, ‘nokia software’, ‘nokia mobile’, ‘nokia games’, ‘nokia themes’, nokia pc suite’ and ‘nokia nigeria’ amongst others to get information about the world most popular mobile brand.
Again, the top 10 rising searches were ‘etisalat’ (+3000%), ‘obama’ (+1850%), ‘facebook’(+550%), ‘youtube’ (+100%), ‘www.yahoomail.com’ (+60%), ‘jobs in nigeria’ (+60%), ‘yahoo mail’ (+50%), ‘yahoomail.com’ (+40%), ‘yahoomail’ (+40%) and ‘opera’ (+40%).
I thought it would be interesting to highlight that in 2008, the top 3 search terms related to ‘opera’ were ‘opera download’, ‘opera mini’, ‘opera browser’, which means that more Nigerian web users prefered the opera browser to firefox or google browser. Besides, people are starting to embrace the mobile web which explains the 704.9% traffic increase from Nigeria for the use of Opera Mini and page-view growth of 1690.2% since January 2008, according to Opera’s State Of the Mobile Web Report for September 2008.
My Opinion
A look at the overall Google Insights report shows a lack of quality search terms for Nigeria. My guess is that Google’s Zeitgeist might have disregarded the search terms from Nigeria for 2008 perhaps because they lacked the credibility for a quality search term. With terms like ‘1.4 lite’ making the top 10 list, it doesn’t sound good at all for Nigeria.
I think that search terms like ‘nokia’, ’social networking’, ‘playstation’, ‘blackberry’, or even startups in nigeria could have been more likely quality search terms. It would be interesting to see what Nigerian top searches would reveal in the next 90 days in 2009. And, I’ll be happy to see Nigerian top searches in Google’s Zeitgeist for 2009.
Good find.
Opera is a terrific browser. I have been using it, infact addicted to it circa 2002.
Its currentl alpha ver 10 is a blazing speed engine.
Nice blog in general
Opera mini is popular because it is used by most people to bypass filters set by the GSM companies so they can browse freely.
I am actually taken aback by “lite 1.4″. I was expecting Nigerian jobs to top the list.
I just ran a search for it.
Lite 1.4 is actually an email extractor.
sensing something here?
@Dapxin - Thanks for your comment. You’re right. It think Opera does better than Firefox.
@Drixie - You’re right, didn’t know that until I ran a search myself. Let’s watch this space in 2009 and see if Lite 1.4 would stay on the 2nd spot or fizzle out. My hope is to see the later happen:-)
well,are we t agree with this out come.what happen to wikipedia.org .i know it rings a bell 4 nigerian students,past and present.
well,are we to agree with this out come.what happen to wikipedia.org .i know it rings a bell 4 nigerian students,past and present.
Not sure about this “I also noticed that the term ‘nokia’ has been on 6th position in the last 90 days, which means that more people use nokia in Nigeria compared to other mobile phones.” Though this might be the case but a high serach term does not mean high usuage.
Does your css feed work ?