Wednesday, June 07, 2006
World Cup and Google trends
It’s Wednesday morning on AM Live and it’s time for Cybersurf, your weekly flip into the virtual and I am Steven Lang with some quick updates on what you can find on the internet.
At this point, you have most certainly gone on to the World Cup soccer site at www.fifaworldcup.yahoo.com and discovered that it lives up to the huge spectacle we are about to see on our TV screens and follow on our web sites.
The countdown on the Germany 2006 site is ticking away – right now about two days ten hours and a few minutes to go. I can’t wait.
If you’d like to get away from the official site – I strongly recommend the www.soccerblog.com. It has huge amounts of information, news, team information and best of all great video clips. The clips are not very long, and the quality is not superb but you do get to see footage of some great goals including some for the recent friendly matches.
I am not sure how legal all this is but – it’s a blog.
There is also a list of the teams slogans – some of them predictably predicatble.
How about the USA with “United we play, United we win”
The Australians – ho hum – “Australia Socceroos – Bound for Glory”
Ghana – “Go Black Stars, the stars of our world”
The Spanish slogan reveals a remarkable lack of ambition:
“Spain, One country, one goal”
And the French recall the name of the cup with “Liberte, Egalite, Jules Rimmet”
And the top prize for jingoism goes to Coast Rica with
”Our army is the team, our weapon is the ball.
Let’s go to Germany and give it our all”
Now let us throw all pretence at impartiality out the window and look at a blog dedicated exclusively to the Brazilian team at the world cup.
If you go to brazil.worldcupblog.org you will find a huge site that collates news articles from around the world about the Brazilian team and at the same time receives comments from users.
If you look at the site now you will see that the biggest concern from supporters is that the run up to the Cup has been so smooth. Many pundits recalling the crises the affected the Brazilian team before previous World Cup victories are worried about the almost complete absence of problems facing the favourites.
Next I wanted to find out what people are searching for on the ‘net – who are the most popular players. So having a good idea where to start – I went to Google Trends which you can find at google.com/trends
And typed in Henry, ronaldinho, rooney and beckham. You can imagine my surprise when Henry came up tops by a long way.
Of course the mistakte I had made was that Henry picked up a lot of entries from the USA where people were just looking for their buddy Henry.
I then replaced Henry – or should I say Enry and fond that in fact Ronaldino was the most popular search followed by Beckham.
Interesting exercise – try it yourself at google trends.
And if you would like to look up any of these addresses, please go to the Cybersurf blog at Cybersurf.blogspot.com
One more time Cybersurf.blogspot.com
Till next week – cheers for now.
