Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon: Who's Most Popular on Search?

Companies like Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN), Oracle (ORCL), HP (HPQ), IBM (IBM), and Dell (DELL) each spend upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars a year to get people to think about them. Other corporations -- Google (GOOG), Facebook, and Twitter come to mind -- depend on word-of-mouth, free services, and "buzz" to catch potential customer attention. But who's getting the job done? Here's an answer, thanks to Google.

Google has a tool called Insights for Search. Plug in keywords and you get the relative number of times they appear as search terms. So that's what I did for some top tech companies for a rough estimate of how often they're on people's minds. Because you can only compare five terms at once, I ran the software multiple times, including the most popular two terms every time. That seemed to force the same relative scaling. (At least the top two terms retained the same numbers, acting as a constant comparison.)

I chose a combination of some of the biggest high tech companies with some companies like Facebook and Twitter that have garnered significant public attention. I also focused the search over the last 12 months. Here is the list of company names and their relative scores:

In a decisive victory, Facebook went to the top, with Google second. Every other company was effectively an also ran. (And that's with apple also being a generic term as well as a company name.)

But you can go beyond a mass of names and look at specific groups of competitors. For example, take Apple, Microsoft, Google, Motorola (MOT), and Nokia (NOK), all of which are involved in the handset business. Here are the relative results for that group:

However, compare some of the mobile operating system names themselves and you get a different picture:

Or you can compare personal computer operating systems:

Google Insights for Search has the potential to be a good tool for many businesses. A few caveats:

• We can't know the context -- positive, negative, or neutral -- of the search.
• A term like windows or apple will be used in a context other than computers.
• You can restrict the comparison to a given category and get strongly differing results. For example, I tried the mobile phone OS list in both Internet and Telecommunications. Completely different answers (other than iPhone being out in front).