I have often wondered what other people around the world think about dogs, have not you? One of the best ways to understand globally what people think about dogs is to look at each country’s top five dog related search terms on Google.
Google also provides information about how many people who search each term per month as well as how many terms it considers to be associated with Dogs out of all the terms that are searched on this search engine. These are all good indicators as to the strength of feeling towards dogs in each country. Firstly regarding the number of terms searched, even though America is considered to be the largest developed nation, it only recorded 620 dog terms out of a possible 800 in October 2010. The highest search term number was recorded by the UK with the full 800 terms followed by Canada on 701. Surprisingly for its relatively small population, Australia came in fourth with 366 terms.
To set a benchmark, America generally has around 250K searches for the specific word ‘dogs’ a month. The UK 100k, Canada (40k) and Australia (30K).
The analysis then grouped the largest developing countries together. Three of the most populous countries had these many searches: China (1K), India (40K) and Brazil (2k). While these countries often have many stray dogs, there is often not any direct ownership or medical care for dogs. To highlight how differently these countries view dogs, you will find that most of the developed countries have words like dogs or 'dog training' in their top five terms. By comparison China has dog clothes and 'dog tags', and India has 'dog pictures' in two variations in its top five.
Next you may consider that Europe with its highly developed cities would also have a strong search for all things dogs, but in general European countries massively under-perform. For instance Germany is the lead country with 213 terms searched, but the dogs term receives less than 10K searches per month. France has only 137 terms and its lead term has near 20k searches. Meanwhile Italy has only 100 terms associated with dogs searched and its main term is under 3k searches per month.
Other massively under performing dog search countries are {Russia, Japan and Israel| Japan, Russia and Israel|Russia, Israel & Japan|. All of these countries have a fairly high degree of sophistication but very few Google dog searches. Russia has nearly 150 million people yet it only has around 2k dog searches. Japan is one of the highest tech countries but its search for dogs is very similar to Russia. Israel also has similar search numbers.
So what does this mean you may wonder? I found that one of the best way to make sense of the data was to compare all countries on a common scale. To do this I compared their total dog market searches divided by a country’s population and plotted this against the national wealth per person.
To make the data even I adjusted the search numbers based on a country’s internet usage and Google marketshare. The results are quite amazing in that there appears to be a strong logarithmic relationship between the searches numbers and wealth variables. All of the largest population countries are quite poor in terms of wealth per person and so their dog searches are minimal - even with all the data adjustments.