By Sterling “Chip” Camden
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

ReadWriteWeb alerted us to the stealth release of Google Internet Stats, a new service from Google in which you can browse or search for trivia about the Internet and related topics – just in case you can’t waste enough time on Wikipedia or YouTube.

The service is hosted on Google’s co.uk domain, and many of the statistics bear a correspondingly Anglophilic slant.  For instance, the first entry when browsing under “Technology” (as of this writing) is:

93% of enterprises (10+ employees) in the UK have Internet access.

Eurostat ‘ICT Usage by Enterprises 2008’, ICT Statistics, December 2008

Searching for “iphone” results in two entries, the first of which is:

In the UK, 55% of iPhone users and 34% of smartphone users have used web search, as opposed to 12% of total mobile phone users.

eMarketer, March 2009

However, the list of data sources is far from exclusively British:

Data provided by the following vendors: B2Bonline.com, BARB, BusinessWeek, Coke, Commission of the European Communities, Comscore, Core Metrics, Datamonitor, Deloitte, The Economist, eMarketer, Enders Analysis, Eurostat, Film Distributors Association, Financial Times, Forrester, GFK, Google Insights for Search, Greenbee.com, Guardian, HarvardBusiness.org, Hitwise, IAB, IFPI, IMF, Internet Retailing, Internetworldstats.com, JP Morgan, KMPG, Media & Marketing, Mediascope Europe, Mindshare, Motorola, Net Imperative, New York Magazine, Nielsen, NMA, Ofcom, Ipsos MediaCT, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, QuickPlay Media Inc., Retail Week, Reuters, TGI Net, Times Online, TNS, Verdict Research, Wall Street Journal, WARC, YouTube, ZenithOptimedia, GM

Users can also submit statistics of their own, if they provide a source article with an online link.  Apparently, Google doesn’t trust its users to quite the same extent as some online knowledge bases (that we’ll refrain from naming) that allow content to be posted before it is vetted.

Here’s an interesting one, filed under “Consumer Trends”:

20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

YouTube, May 2009

So how many decades of nonsense are being viewed every minute?

Unfortunately, searches for “geeksaresexy” or “geeks are sexy” turned up no results.  :(