Ripple the company created the cryptocurrency XRP . On the web, people including myself use Ripple to usually mean XRP. Coindesk describes Ripple as “the name for both a digital currency (XRP) and an open payment network within which that currency is transferred.” Technically we should be using XRP versus Ripple to describe the currency. Are we actually doing this? Do we all interchange these terms everywhere? Let’s find out…

Google Trends can help us answer this question. You can enter a set of Google searches to see how popular those terms are compared to each other. I typed in “buy Ripple” and “buy XRP” to see which term is used more. The “buy Ripple” term was used over “buy XRP” about 5 to 1. Here is the interest over time chart.

In this data set, I saw two countries that don’t follow the rest of the world, Latvia and Argentina. In Lativa, people search for the term XRP 18 times more than Ripple! Having been to both of these countries, I have no clue why this is the case. And both, by the way, are incredible countries to visit!

I searched for Latvia XRP and nothing popped up that would illuminate this difference. I figured I’d find some really famous Latvian people sharing about XRP using the term XRP. I didn’t find anything amongst the English language sites. I did enjoy, however, reading about famous Latvians such as the man who inspired the Crocodile Dundee (I thought he was Australian!). Whatever’s the case, there’s a reason why people in Latvia and Argentina use the XRP term over Ripple.

Just for fun, I typed in “Buy Ripple” versus “Buy Bitcoin.” Here is the graph of interest over time (Ripple is the blue line).

For a few months, buying Ripple was a more popular search term than buying Bitcoin. And around the first week of this year, searches for buying Ripple were 75% of the volume of the highest day recorded for searches for buying Bitcoin. Interesting relative ranking perspective. At the highest levels of people googling “Buy Bitcoin,” the search term “Buy Ripple” reached 75% of that volume.

Here I added in Ethereum (yellow line).

We’re probably stuck with the term Ripple to mean the cryptocurrency. My quick search shows the difference worldwide is already 5 to 1. That is unless we follow the lead of the Latvians. One more thing. Google Trends may change results slightly. Your results may differ slightly but trends still shine through.