Online Peek: Which Sports Are the Most Popular?
I think it is about time this morning we go back to basics.
Let’s re-examine some of the items and trends people look for on the internet.
When it comes to sports, what are some of the most popular searches going on right now and how do we find what is trending in popular search engines like Google?
Easy.
Our first stop naturally shoild be to Google Trends.
This site proves insight into the most popular searches, by day on the intenrnet. So as a little experiment, I wanted to see what was trending on Google this morning.
Not surprising, several sports terms are dotted among the top 20 this morning. If you look to the right, you’ll see Reggie Bush ranked number one at the moment this morning, Sidney Rice (#4), Carlos Beltran (#10), the Minnesota Vikings (#16) and Kyle Orton (#18). Each has hit the radar for very different reasons. However, you can get a quick glimpse of what interests the internet world at the moment.
Click on the search terms and Google provides tyou with more indepth statistics and links to why these are hot searches.
Now, I wanted to take a closer look to see, which of the major sports has been searched for the most and Google certainly allows you to cusomize your search. My first search term was baseball, since it is is the only major sport currently “in season” meaning the Major League baseball teams are playing meaningful games.
Now that the NFL lockout has ended, I added football as a search term.
To no one’s surprise, footnball searches passed baseball this week as fans want to know the latest information on the most popular sport in America right now.
You can see this below as the blue and red lines cross during the month of July.
The data above is searches, in the United States only for 2011. Why didn’t I include the rest of the world for this? Well, much of the world refers to American soccer as football so it could have been a confusing term so I limited the search to the United States only for now.
Next, I added Basketball and Hockey, wanting to see from January to July where the other two major sports teams fell in terms of popular search terms.
Keep in mind, these searches can include anything relates to each sport.
What do I mean? This could include hockey practice, hockey leagues, and hockey sticks, not necessarily the National Hockey League. As you can see from above, the search term basketball, outlined in green, received a nice spike in late March and April.
The kletters refer to major stories and links to them which could have influenced a spike. I did not link those for the use of this blog post.
Lastly, I wanted to show you a full year’s worth of search for the major sports terms so I looked back at 2010.
Certainly from July to December, there is no question which search and probably sport is the most popular in America today.
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Just as a random side point, hockey is also a regional word. The default hockey in Australia and in several other places is field hockey, not ice hockey.