Poor Google Docs usage — poor study

Clickstream, a web analytics firm, released a study at the end of last week suggesting that Google Docs was used by one percent of adult web users in the U.S., while Microsoft Office’s Word was used by more than 50 percent. Then, Google-employed bloggers and friends spent the weekend shredding it, citing poor methodology.

Clickstream based its study on 2,400 U.S. adult Internet users who had installed the company’s data-collection software — in exchange for doing things like competing to win cash and prizes. Also, as others pointed out, Clickstream has some ex-Microsoft employees on staff.

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Compete, a generally credible web analytics rival that buys data from internet service providers themselves, among other sources, also recently reported that Google Docs had 4.4 million users in September (note: Compete underreports VentureBeat traffic). The U.S. population is a little more than 300 million, so that puts Google Docs at more than one percent.

Google itself doesn’t provide Docs traffic, so until it does, I’ve included a screenshot from a new data set created by Google Blogoscoped blogger Philipp Lenssen, using fake-data site eSolutions Data.