Since Google+ launched, we have been left wondering how many users signed up, and were able to join in the first days. Wild estimates and predictions have been made, including complicated prognoses based on surnames. The latest and most widespread one by Paul Allen said that Google+ could surpass 20 million users by this weekend, as we reported here at The Blog Herald.
Until the Google(+) overlords decide they will publish user stats, we can only guess and guesses will continue to be made. But the service could be much more popular than expected already and with help of the Palo Alto search giant’s own tools, I discovered the rather amazing number of 40,100,000 profiles already.
Thanks to Google’s advanced search operators it is rather simple to do a search for profile URLs only on Google+. Use the following query to search to check yourself:
url:plus.google.com/*about site:plus.google.com
What this does is:
url:plus.google.com/*about: We look for URLs on Google plus containing ‘About’, one of the parts of your profile.
site:plus.google.com: Search for results only on Google+ itself.
You can check the result yourself here.
Right now the numbers seem to fluctuate between 39,700,000 and 40,100,000. It is important to understand that dynamic search engines such as Google (and most others) can not return an exact number of results found.
These search engines can only return an estimate at first. The number of results will be corrected as one cycles through the results and reaches the end of the SERPs for a query, when the SE determines how many results there are.
We do not know either whether all results returned are unique profiles, but based on the number around 40 million it is safe to say that Google+ has already reached more than 25 million users in less than one month.
There are only two further questions now:
1. Will Google+ reach 100 million users in less than three months, thanks to exponential growth?
2. How many of these 25 million users are active and contribute regularly?
Why don’t you join me on Google+ for even more Google+ updates and tips & tricks?
