Google Hits

Sometimes people use google's number of hits stats to illustrate to what extent a topic is relevant or discussed. Recently a colleague did it on Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) and I did it as well. We came up with totally different numbers of hits!

Strange and after some playing around I discovered that apperently the 'interface language' setting (under preferences) has some major impact.

Good laboratory practice hits in google. Interface language:
- english: 3270k
- dutch: 9820k
- german: 9760k
- chinese: 9930k

Weird is it not? And on top of that "Good laboratory practice" (with the quotes) gives 191k hits regardsless the language........

Testing something completely different: lovely dress. Googling on these two words gives about 35M hits regardless the interface language.

So what do we learn form this?

1. lovely dresses are more important then GLP
2. far more people do GLP in some random order (3 - 10M hits) then in the correct order (191k hits)
3. google seems to be censoring google for the anglosaxon world; at least as far as GLP is concerned