It has been more than a month since Google started their Facebook-competitor Google Plus. The media response has been immense, even now we still see people write up comments on the different aspects and background of this new Google service on a daily basis. When I monitor my inbox for messages that Google sends me when someone adds me to their circle, then it seems as though the growth of Google Plus is still picking up speed. In this posting I want to show two evaluations that we did for Google Plus that should help take a closer look at this growth: on the one hand, we started to monitor a multitude of URLs for the amount of votes they received since the start of Google Plus. You can already find this data in the SISTRIX Labs as part of the Top-URLs as well as the weekly winners. Here we have the growth in votes for 3 interesting URLs:


While we are able to see some growth, it is in no way in the same order of magnitude what you would expect for something that has more than 40 million users, at the time of writing, as well as an integration of their button in the Google-SERPs: Google's homepage, which currently holds the number 4 spot of most often “plussed” URLs, was only able to gain about thirteenthousand new votes over the past five weeks. In comparison: the Facebook-homepage was able to garner more than 200.000 “Likes” in the same amount of time.

For our second evaluation we crawled about 100 million pages from about 400.000 mostly German-speaking domains and analysed whether they had the usual social-media-buttons from Facebook, Twitter and Google+ . The results are astonishing:


The Google-Plus-button is already integrated in more domains than the Twitter-button – even though Twitter has already been on the market for a considerably longer time. While there still is a gap to Facebook, it is not as if Facebook has an uncatchable lead. Looking forward, I think it could be especially hard for Twitter, which did not add any new features within the past few years, to find their own position between the two Internet-giants Facebook and Google, that does not end up being the MySpace-way.