Has Google+ reached 40 million users?

Posted on July 14th, 2011. Written by Rico.

According to Franky Branckaute of Splashpress Media, it may be possible to use Google itself to determine how many users have Google+ accounts. “I initially thought that Paul Allen’s numbers… overestimate[s]… [but] a little Googling today shows numbers in a total different ballpark.”

Branc continues:

If the query url:plus.google.com/*about site:plus.google.com is correct and only results in results pointing at profiles, we can say that Google+ already has reached the number of 20 million.

Note: While the query shows 40 million results, it is important to know that most search engines are not able to return a correct number and make guesses. Correct numbers can only be displayed once you have cycled through all SERPs, and the SE was actually able to calculate how many different results it has in its index.

While most people just type in their desired topic in a Google search box, various advanced search operators can be used to define a more specific search (See: How to Keep Searching for Music on Multiply).

Here’s what Franky used:

• site: Only list results hosted on a specific website. In this case plus.google.com
• url: Show results in a specific site with the word “about” in it. plus.google.com/*about

Does an estimated Google+ user base of 20 million make sense to you? Franky halved Google’s own estimate, because search engines are pretty fuzzy about the number of results that correspond to a specific search. In any case, Google+ statistics site findpeopleonplus.com needs to keep track of a larger user sample!