Ogling Google: "Jesus" is bigger than "The Beatles"
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Google's analysis of game box popularity in November 2001 |
April 18, 2002 John Lennon's 1966 assertion that "The Beatles are bigger than Jesus," may have been true then, but not now. At Google, roughly 170,000 people a month search for "The Beatles," while 850,000 a month search for Jesus. (830,000 search for "Beatles.")
I found these numbers using Google's Adwords program, which uses historical data to estimate how many times a "keyword" is sought in a day, week and month. Joanne Jacobs notes that many people have not used Adwords yet, so here's the crib sheet: a) configure an ad and press "continue" b) insert the name of your favorite pop icon in the "Keyword Matching" field and press "Update Keyword Estimates" button c) note the result and start again.
Ogling Google, or, for short, Oogling, could make a great new bar game. With some imaginative programming, Oogling could put marketing research and polling companies out of business.
Google has just opened its API, which has people like Dave Winer and Tim O'Reilly cheering and wondering what's next.
As Google searches for new revenue streams, the biggest of them all may be right beneath everyone's nose. Processing over 150 million searches a day, the search engine is the world's best mind-reading machine. Google should charge the API-scrapers a fee and let industrial grade Oogling begin!
The Oogle's absolute data is much more engaging than the zeitgeist "hit list" numbers that make relative comparisons among popular searches. With the raw numbers, we can peel back the consumer's skull and watch the synapses fire.
Yes, Jesus (850,000) beats The Beatles. But even "cheese" gets 750,100. Harry Potter gets 920,000. Clinton gets 1,030,100. Jennifer Lopez gets 1,135,100. Eminem gets 1,235,100. And Britney Spears gets 2,540,200.
Britney is nearly twice as big as God, who gets just 1,295,100 searches. But she's smaller than football, which gets 2,605,200. (All these numbers were researched in early April.)
Beyond celebrity watching, there are brands. Who would have guessed that Adobe gets 2,570,200 searches a month compared to 3,590,300 for Oracle and 6,495,600 for Microsoft. Coke pulls only 216,800 requests.
Anti-brands do even better: Linux pulls a monstrous 16,001,400 and MP3 pulls 23,122,100.
Republican gets 165,000 searches versus 130,000 for Democrat.
Harvard gets 750,100 versus 275,000 for Yale.
Media figures like Tom Brokaw and Garrison Keillor get zero, while Esther Dyson gets 15,000 searches. Jerry Garcia pulls 20,500, Albert Einstein pulls 100,000, and Martin Luther King pulls 405,200. Osama rates 61,900. Arafat pulls 15,500.
Proving that many people still don't understand the Internet, the word "Google" itself gets searched for on Google 1,685,200 times a month and www.google.com gets 140,000 searches. That compares to 4,785,400 searches for Yahoo and 350,000 for www.yahoo.com.
If you were BMW (2,305,100) and had just spent $10 million on an adblitz, wouldn't you like to see how much your Oogle jumped relative to Mercedes (1,303,900) or Porsche (927,700) and relative to the Oogle of other premium words like champagne(195,800)?
If you're really ambitious marketeer, you'll want to know how your word measures against the world's hottest. But chances are you aren't within an order of magnitude of sex, which pulls 32,657,300 searches a month.
(You may want to vote in the poll before you consult the (badly formatted) Oogle list below to make your own comparisons.)
Henry Copeland in Budapest, Hungary
Garrison Keillor 0
Tom Brokaw 0
Connie Chung 5000
Chirac 15000
Esther Dyson 15000
Arafat 15500
Ringo Starr 25000
Paul McCartney 35000
www.altavista.com 35000
Blog 45000
David Letterman 45000
George Harrison 50000
Thursday 50000
Allah 60000
Wednesday 60000
Osama 61900
Steve Jobs 65000
Los Angeles Times 75000
Monday 85000
xbox 90000
Financial Times 95000
Albert Einstein 100000
Democrat 130000
Muhammad 130000
Wall Street Journal 135000
Tuesday 140000
www.google.com 140000
John Lennon 150100
Friday 155000
enya 160000
Republican 165000
The Beatles 170000
Buddha 175000
Bob Dylan 185000
McDonalds 185100
Walmart 190000
Coke 216800
Cnet 225000
Rolling Stones 255000
Bill Gates 265000
Yale 275000
Moscow 280000
New York Times 290000
Saturday 295000
Ikea 315000
Nsync 325000
Dylan 330000
Blair 345000
www.yahoo.com 350000
Backstreet boys 375000
CNN 385000
Martin Luther King 405200
Sunday 480000
Meat 495000
Edinburgh 580100
U2 595000
playstation 2 655000
Cheese 750100
Harvard 750100
Beatles 830000
Jesus 850000
Harry Potter 920000
BBC 980000
Amazon 990100
Chemistry 1015100
Clinton 1030100
Jennifer Lopez 1135100
Rome 1185100
Eminem 1235100
God 1295200
Soccer 1345100
Google 1685200
Poetry 1770200
Ass 1810100
Bush 1855200
Arizona 1890200
dell 1955100
Georgia 1955200
Newspaper 2000100
Yellow 2120200
NY 2175200
Tits 2220200
bmw 2305100
XML 2390200
Britney Spears 2540200
adobe 2570200
Football 2605200
Ohio 2880300
Oracle 3590300
SMS 3835300
Paris 4035300
Blue 4635400
Yahoo 4785400
sony 4975300
Red 5305500
palm 5345400
White 5700500
Microsoft 6495600
Radio 6960500
nokia 7255500
London 7410600
New York 8025700
TV 8070600
Black 9810900
History 11326200
LA 15006300
Linux 16001400
MP3 23122100
Sex 32637300
