google popularity contests

i like to use google to conduct popularity contests. i use the total number of results to compare two terms.

here’s one, who’s more popular, “kanye west” or “fifty cent”? (put all terms in quotes)

kanye west: 5,040,000
fifty cent: 526,000

so kanye wins, right? not so quick, let’s try some alternative search terms and spellings. 

50 cent: 11,700,000
fitty cent: 22,500
kanye: 28,100,000

so who wins? well it’s hard to call. let’s assume that the original “kanye  west” search term included all the results for “kanye”. this effectively gives him 23,060,000. fifty cent, with all his combined results gets 12,248,500. so Kanye wins. But what would have happened had we searched “50” alone or “cent” alone. Well, “50” gets 3,210,000,000 results and “cent” gets 147,000,000. This would of course, by our standard, make fifty cent the distant winner by a few billion. 

however, “kanye” is a unique name whereas “50” and “cent” are both a commonly used number and word in english. this begs the question, is there an advantage to having a unique name online? i certainly think there is, but not in terms of quantity of search results, but rather accuracy. 50 cent is popular enough that if you google 50 cent sans quotes the entire first page of results and then some pertain to him. i guarantee had you googled him 8 years ago this wouldn’t have been the case. 

what i’m trying to say is that i’m thinking of changing my name, “david hoffman” generates 284,000 results. “david a hoffman” generates 17,200 results. i think i’ll change it to “Excalibur Roenshack”. There are currently 0 google results for that search.