A world of curiosity: a peek at searches around the globe

Every day, people come to Google Search to ask questions. Through Google, questions become answers, and answers lead to the next set of questions. These people come from around the world and all walks of life, speaking hundreds of different languages, typing in search queries every single day. Today we’re sharing the Search Globe, a new visual display representing one day of Google searches around the world—visualizing the curiosity of people around the globe.

This visualization was developed and designed by the Google Data Arts Team using WebGL, a new technology for modern browsers that uses your computer’s hardware to generate fast, 3D graphics. As a result, you need a WebGL-enabled browser, like Google Chrome, to see the Globe. You can learn more about the technology behind the Globe on the Google Code Blog.

The Search Globe visualizes searches from one day, and shows the language of the majority of queries in an area in different colors. You’ll see a bright landscape of queries across Europe, and parts of Asia for instance, but unfortunately we see many fewer searches from parts of the world lacking Internet access—and often electricity as well—like Africa. We hope that as the Internet continues to become more accessible over time and people continue to ask questions, we’ll see this globe shine brightly everywhere.

We’ve also open sourced this platform so that developers can build their own globes using their own data, and we look forward to seeing other globes orbiting around the web.

Update 12:45PM: If you'd like to embed the Search Globe on your own site, here's the embed code:

<iframe src="http://data-arts.appspot.com/globe-search/embed" height="500" width="500"></iframe>

Enjoy!

Posted by Valdean Klump, Google Data Arts Team