It is by default that when a Google user registers for a Google Plus account his profile including the link to it will be indexed by the search engine. One blogger discovered based on the sitemap of Google that there are nearly 195 million Google Plus users to date but since it has already jumpstarted, it is expected that the numbers would go higher in the following months. Do you want to know how he knew this? Here’s how…
On the sitemap page, there are 39,000 thousand text documents and each of them contains 5,000 links to different Google Plus profiles. So, let’s multiply 39,000 documents by 5,000 profile links…that would give us 195 million Google Plus users.
Wait, how did you come up with 39,000 documents?
Visit this page and scroll down to the bottom and you will see a link like this:http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/sitemap-00038999.txt
As you can see the series ends with 00038999 and was last updated on March 16th, 2012. And this links to a text document containing 5,000 links to Google Plus profiles.
Now that we know how we got to 195 million users, we can proceed to discovering the number of blank documents. The blogger who discovered this sitemap said that there are about 25 million profiles which are currently blank, or perhaps not active. To be able get this you need to do a quick search using the following string:
site:plus.google.com “has not filled * profile yet” inurl:about
What does it mean for Google?
This is how this string is interpreted by Google search engine. Let me say it in layman’s term: “Search the site plus.google.com and display pages containing these words ‘has not filled, profile yet’ and display the URL containing the word ‘about’.”
Once you did the search “[Profile Name] has not filled out his profile yet” will be seen in bold as well as the word “about” in the profile link. Yeah, you try it and you’ll see.
Now, how did the blogger find out that there are about 25 million inactive Google Plususers?
Try to do the search using the string and you will be able to read “About 24,800,000 results” which can be found just beneath the search field. Now, it’s clear that Google’s social networking site has 170 million users which it had acquired over a short period of time.
Currently, Facebook is still on the lead with 850 million users worldwide. Twitter said it only has 140 million active tweeters. So, basically Google has overtaken Twitter as far as number of active users is concerned.
In January, Larry Page from Google posted a public note revealing the fact that Google Plus had 90 million users but two months after it has been doubled showing the Big G’s social networking site is growing each day.
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