Matt Cutts is the head of the Google Webspam team. Every so often, he will entertain questions sent in by webmasters to shed light on important issues and expound on interesting topics. This time the question is about user statistics.

 

Ian from the United Kingdom surmises that Google has the largest data set in existence regarding Internet users and such would be helpful to many who want to study them. He is mainly interested in browser and OS market share. These two are readily available off of sites like StatCounter, NetApplication, and the like but their accuracy is greatly compromised by the meager sample size. Will Google ever provide statistics on browser market share?

Unfortunately, Matt has not heard of any moves towards this direction. Even if the data eventually becomes publicly available, he believes that these should not be immediately accepted as 100% reliable. He argues that there is inherent bias in any sample so a bit of caution is necessary. As an example, the users of Google Analytics tend to be more tech-savvy as compared to the rest of the population, and this characteristic will affect the results.

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Will Google ever provide statistics on browser market share? –