CONSUMER
Ireland home to lonely surfers
16-05-2006
by Ciara O'Brien
Irish internet users are the loneliest in the world, according to Google.
The Google Trends service, which works out how many times users in a particular region search for specific terms, has pinpointed "lonely" as the search term most frequently entered by Irish users. The service looks at a sample of Google web searches in order to formulate its results, using IP address information to pinpoint location -- and the outlook is not too bright for Ireland's online population.
Despite a booming economy, Dublin came out top of the "lonely" searchers when the list was broken down into cities, indicating that the capital may have a high proportion of internet users who feel isolated. Melbourne, Australia, came second, while Auckland, New Zealand, came third.
In the search stakes by country, Ireland was closely followed by users in Singapore and New Zealand. However, Singapore users can also lay claim to being the most frequent searchers for the word "happiness". Meanwhile, "lonely" searchers in Australia, Malaysia, the UK, Canada, Thailand, India and Denmark made up the rest of the top ten ranked by country.
However, the findings of the study would seem to contradict those of an Economist Intelligence Unit survey last year, in which Ireland was ranked the country with the best "quality of life" in the world.
Looking at other search terms, Birmingham can lay claim to the dubious honour of being the top searcher for pornography around the globe. The city was followed by Manchester in second place, while Australians figured highly in the top ten, with Brisbane, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne all showing high incidences for the search term. Porn searchers were most active in 2005, according to Google Trends, when searches reached a record high.
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