Searching for Baseball

At the end of each year, Google (as well as other search engines) does an analysis on what was searched on for that year.  Rising trends, falling trends, trends in all aspects of our society.  Google calls this trend analysis project “Zeitgeist” and they just released their results for 2009.

Looking at the fastest rising trends in the United States overall, we’re not going to find anything baseball related, sorry.  Actually, nothing sports related.  Twitter, Michael Jackson, and Facebook headed up the top ten of general keywords.  Among fastest FALLING was “olympics” but that makes sense as 2008 was naturally a big year for it and it was going to trend downward. 

What IS more relevant to our interests as baseball fans is search trends within the realm of sports.  Fortunately, Google does parse that out for us.  Here are some of the highest searched keywords within United States in sports.

Among baseball teams, there are no surprises.  There’s a reason for that East Coast bias:

1. yankees
2. red sox
3. phillies
4. cubs
5. mets
6. dodgers
7. braves
8. tigers
9. cubs
10. twins

Taking a look at all sports stadiums, three baseball parks make the list:

1. yankee stadium
2. cowboys stadium
3. giants stadium
4. gillette stadium
5. lucas oil stadium
6. reliant stadium
7. dodger stadium
8. raymond james stadium
9. busch stadium
10. shea stadium

The Yankees’ ballpark gets the #1 nod for a couple reasons, I’m sure.  One, their move to a new stadium.  Two, they won the World Series.  And three, well, they’re the Yankees.

Interestingly, no baseball managers made the top 10 list of sports coaches.  Nor did any baseball rivalries.  Both of them were dominated by college, NBA and football.  

1.  red river rivalry (texas vs. oklahoma) 2. michigan ohio state rivalry 3. unc duke rivalry 4. colts patriots rivalry 5. vikings packers rivalry 6. bears packers rivalry 7. georgia florida rivalry 8. giants dodgers rivalry 9. lakers celtics rivalry 10. steelers browns rivalry

coach k (mike krzyzewski – duke university basketball) mike tomlin (pittsburgh steelers) josh mcdaniels (denver broncos) john calipari (university of kentucky basketball) erik spoelstra (miami heat) sean miller (university of arizona basketball) bill belichick (new england patriots) roy williams (university of north carolina basketball) phil jackson (los angeles lakers) tom cable (oakland raiders)

 

Interesting that the Packers get searched on two different rivalries.

There’s more info at the Google Zeitgeist 2009 web site.