Google Search users in the United States are 10 times more likely to encounter a problem than users in Brazil, according to this unique one-year survey from Pingdom.

Google has a large number of localized versions of their Google Search homepage. We have monitored the uptime of Google Search for 32 different countries during a whole year to see how they perform when it comes to availability (uptime).

The website with the most downtime was the Swedish Google Search (www.google.se) which was unavailable a total of 48 minutes. The website with the least downtime was the Brazilian Google Search (www.google.com.br) which was only unavailable for a total of 3 minutes.

In other words, Google Search users in Sweden are 16 times more likely to encounter a problem than Google Search users in Brazil.

The American Google Search (www.google.com) ended up in position 26 out of 32, with ten times more downtime than the Brazilian Google Search.

Source: The uptime monitoring service Pingdom.

The average downtime of these 32 websites is 23 minutes in a year.

It is interesting that several countries not traditionally associated with a good internet infrastructure ended up in top positions with very little downtime. Notable examples are Brazil, India, Thailand and Mexico.

Sweden on the other hand has a reputation for being one of the forerunners on the internet, so it is very surprising to find the Swedish Google Search at the bottom of the list.

Even though this survey contains some surprising results, none of the monitored websites passed below 99.99% uptime, which has to be considered extremely good, even for a company with the resources of Google.

We have contacted Google for a comment, but have not received a response as of this writing.

Excel file with the survey data.

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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