Though Google's definition of active users may not be your own

Mar 7, 2012 14:41 GMT  ·  By

Google+ certainly manages to garner attention, even if it's not always for the best reasons. Google+ is a peculiar beast, it's got well over 100 million users in less than a year since launch.

If this was any other site, that would be huge. But this is Google which has about one billion people using it each month.

And since Google+ is built into Google and into more and more services, it's becoming harder and harder to avoid, signing up for it is almost inevitable. Signing up is one thing though, actually using it is another.

This is where it gets murky. Again, if this was any other site, it would be relatively easy, metrics like how many people visit the site in a month, how often they come back and how long they stay are fairly standard and easy to compare to other products.

But since Google+ is built into everything, even if people don't actually visit Google+, they may still be "using" it. At least, that's what Google argues and the company is right, to a degree.

With that in mind, Google now boasts that 50 million people "use" Google+ every day, i.e. they go to any Google site that has Google+ built in, the share box for example. 100 million people "use" the service every month.

As long as they've signed up for Google+ and visit any Google site, they're counted as a user. But just going to Google.com and doing a search doesn't make you a "Google+ user."

Google isn't making it clear whether the users it counts actually engage with Google+ features. The company is making it sound like it doesn't matter, it says that Google+ is just Google 2.0, so if someone visits a Google site, they're a Google+ user. Analytics companies though aren't so convinced.