(Note: I'm on vacation. Appearing here in my absence will be some of my favorite posts from the past.)
(Originally published May 19, 2006)
And Yahoo beats all three of them. In fact, the word Yahoo apparently is the undefeated heavyweight champ of search terms — search terms, not search engines — according to no less of an authority than a new feature from Google called Google Trends. The acronym MSN kicks butt, too, so much so that the term itself oddly outranks the name of a little company called Microsoft.
All of which leads me to conclude that there is either a screw loose in Google Trends, or a logical explanation for these unexpected results that has so far eluded me. Google’s answer below leaves me unsatisfied, but perhaps you’ll judge it differently.
Bottom line: Google has a hard time convincing me that more people intentionally use Google to search on the search-engine names Yahoo and Google than on any other common word or moniker the mind can conjure. Go ahead and give it a shot. I’ll even save you the time of trying these words vs. the words Yahoo or Google:
Care to start with names and events in the news? The words Yahoo or Google garner more search queries than Bush, Cheney, Iraq, war, Britney Spears, “American Idol” or Cruise, the latter even though Google Trends acknowledges that it cannot differentiate between requests for an actor, a missile or a floating buffet. (Want to see a search spike? Try Katrina.)
Common words and terms? Yahoo and Google each blows away mortgage, food, beer, weight, clothes, oil, car, gas prices, phone, cancer, heart, AIDS, love and marriage.
Maybe something from our sports-obsessed culture? That would be tough luck for Tiger Woods, golf, baseball, soccer, basketball and football.
How about the business world? It’s not worth listing all the less-than-worthies, the IBMs, AOLs and Wal-Marts. As noted earlier, Yahoo has croaked Microsoft uninterrupted since 2003 — the earliest data provided. But Microsoft stayed pretty much neck-and-neck with Google through 2004 — today it’s no contest. (Curiously, MySpace looks to be gaining ground on both of the search giants at a rather rapid clip, although one of the limitations of Google Trends is that you don’t get detail on the raw numbers behind the fever charts.)
Religion? Say a prayer for church, bible, pope, god, Jesus Christ and Islam, because not one can hold a novena candle to the search-engine names in terms of worldwide search popularity, according to Google Trends.
So what does Google have to say?
“I don’t think there’s anything specific about search engine queries that would skew the results, however, one thing to keep in mind is that every part of a search query is counted in Google Trends results,” says company spokeswoman Sonya Boralv. “For example, searches for ‘Google,’ ‘Google Video,’ and ‘Google Maps’ would all count toward results for ‘Google.’ This fact may help account for results for popular terms such as search engines.”
Maybe a little, but nowhere near enough. Here’s another way to phrase what Google is asking us to accept:
The number of Google searches for “Yahoo” plus all the phrases and strings that contain the word “Yahoo” exceed the number of Google searches for “sex” plus all the phrases and strings that contain the word “sex.” (Not to mention “Google” and all the phrases and strings that contain the word “Google.”)
In other words, if the Google Trend results do indeed reflect reality, then the world of Google searchers would seem to care more about Yahoo than it does Google … or sex.
And we know that neither is true … don’t we?
Which leaves us little more than room for speculation.
One possibility — a distinct one, no less — would be that it’s me who has the screw loose and this data does indeed represent exactly what it appears to represent: an overriding interest on the part of Google searchers in everything related to search engines.
Another possibility could be that the results returned by Google Trends for the terms Yahoo, Google and MSN are actually measuring something else, or at least something more. What else? What more? Mass confusion? Some kind of search-related racket? … Your guess has to be better than mine.
(Check out the reader comments here. More on this tomorrow.)
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