Google Trends for Websites Shows It's a Small World, After All

For decades, IBM has built a reputation as being among the most buttoned-down of buttoned-down American corporations. But if you take a look at the geography where IBM finds its largest audience on the Web, it's on the other side of the world: Japan.

Well, so says Google Trends for Websites, the latest online toy out of the search giant. In fact, the U.S. represents only the third largest geographic audience for IBM - - India is second. The folks in Armonk may want to start more greatly emphasizing the I in IBM.

Google has now made its Google Trends for Websites broadly available, so the public and slice and dice some selected web metrics for millions of web sites to get a newer angle on how this Internet is moving.It's currently in development by Google Labs, according to the company.

Elsewhere:

Hewlett-Packard's web site still finds, overwhelmingly, its largest web audience coming from the U.S. So does Dell, which has slightly less web traffic than HP, according to the Google measurements.

The early analysis on the Google Trends for Websites itself is a little mixed. For example, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch points out that you can find all kinds of great information on web sites - - just not Google web sites. "Google isn't supplying any good explanation for the exclusion," he writes.

Google itself notes:

"Not all websites are included in Trends for Websites. The following types of websites may not appear in the tool:

*Websites with low traffic volume below our threshold

* Websites that don't wish to be indexed by Google and have indicated their preference through a robots.txt exclusion file

* Websites that don't adhere to our Quality Guidelines

* Other websites for miscellaneous reasons"

It looks like Google can be marked down under "miscellaneous."

Arrington notes that Google, when asked about its own web metrics being unavailable, provided an answer that had something to do with its policy of not providing financial guidance about itself in between fiscal quarters. (Google does, however, provide data for Yahoo. )