Falling Down the Thames Blog 20, 30th July 2014
Judging Importance
The great search engine provides a service that is generally underappreciated. It can be used to crudely estimate how much attention the world is paying to a particular topic. In an era of short attention spans and sound bites, more returns presumably means “more important.”
My search for “Thames River” provided 486,000 returns, but many of those were related to the Thames River in Ontario. When I corrected this and searched for “River Thames” I found 1,500,000 returns. This seemed impressive to me until I discovered that a search for “Game of Thrones” received thirty-four times as many returns.
I found a number of other potentially revealing pair-wise comparisons. What do the following have to say about the state of the world?
“River Thames Barrier” – 1,250,700
“Michael Jackson” – 44,900,000
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“Thames Estuary” – 622,000
“How I Met Your Mother” – 451,000,000
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“University Education” – 1,180,000
“Sasquatch” – 2,247,000 
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“Global Warming” – 17,200,000
“Viagra” – 28,300,000
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“Biological Conservation” – 821,000
“Cheech and Chong” – 1,110,000
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“Global Conflict” – 888,000
“Angry Birds” – 31,300,000 
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“Queen Elizabeth” – 8,110,000
” Justin Bieber” – 73,800,000
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29-year old “Katy Perry” whose birthday is 25 October – 51,700,000
55-year old “Glen Chilton” whose birthday is also 25 October – 32,800
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“Loch Ness Monster” – 775,000
“Falling Down the Thames” – 27
Oh well.
- Glen
Photo credits: River Thames Barrier – www.esri.com; Sasquatch crossing – DustDevil75, i239.photobucket.com; Society for Conservation Biology – www.conbio.org; Glen – www.abc.net.au