[URBAN NOTE] "Why do people use Spanish more than Chinese to Google in the GTA?"

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Peter Edwards reports on patterns in Google searches in Toronto. I would suggest that another explanation might be that users of Chinese languages use search engines other than Google, Baidu for instance.

Toronto has a large Chinese community, but there’s not much Chinese-language Googling out of the GTA. But Toronto has a far smaller Spanish-language community, and Spanish is the most-used language for Googling from here, after the official languages of English and French.

Those are a few of the findings of a just-released study by the Google News Lab.

The study breaks down the estimated more than 3 billion searches a day globally by language and city for Berlin, Delhi, London, Madrid, New York, Paris, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Toronto.

“It’s interesting,” McMaster University sociology professor Vic Satzewich said in an interview.
Satzewich, who has studied patterns of immigration, suggested ebbs and flows in immigration and tourism help explain the Googling patterns.

He suggested that the low number of Chinese-language Googlers from the GTA might be reflected in part by an effort by the government to attract immigrants who are strong in Canada’s two official languages.

The high Spanish-language Googling from the GTA could reflect an increase in temporary workers from Mexico and Guatamala over the past decade.