World Cup 2010: Fans swop Google for Twitter

Google took an interesting look at drops in search queries during World Cup games to try and determine which countries has the most loyal fans.

A look at the graphs posted on Google's blog below, clearly show search queries in Brazil (15 June vs N. Korea) and Spain (25 June vs Chile) drop at the start of a match, spike during halftime, fall again then sharply rise after the match finished.

The countries displaying the highest drop in searches and therefore with the most loyal fans, were lead by Brazil, where queries dropped by half its normal levels during matches.

Germany came second, followed by the Netherlands, South Korea and Uruguay. In fourth place, South Korea is the only Asian country in the top ten, despite certain matches starting at 3.30am Seoul time. Japan, which ended in 15th place, along with Australia and New Zealand, expressed much less interest.

A few countries searched more, but only Honduras and North Korea showing a significant increase.

The most searched topics following matches include David Villa, Thomas Müller, Diego Forlán, Wesley Sneijder, Carlos Puyol, Andres Iniesta, Dani Jarque and Iker Casillas.

In a similar wrap up of activity during the World Cup, Twitter's blog claims the World Cup represented the largest period of sustained activity for an event during the social media giant's history.

The final 15 minutes of most games saw an above average 2,000 tweets per second, with Spain's winning goal pushing that number up to 3,051.

During the final, people from 127 countries tweeted in 27 different languages.