Net Searchers Like God Over Britney – Barely

February 7, 2008

By JAKOB HANES

Tucson Web surfers more curious about immigration and Iraq than Spears, according to Google Trends data

In the United States, God is only slightly more popular than Britney Spears, but at least Tucsonans care more about immigration than Paris Hilton.

Search-engine giants Yahoo and Google have compiled their year- end hot Internet search lists.

Google plans to release its rankings soon, but an informal query of the Google Trends application showed that “porn” and “sex,” as usual, dominated Internet searches in 2007.

Both Google and Yahoo discount those terms when compiling their lists because they are seen as statistical outliers. Google’s list will differ from Yahoo’s because they count terms differently. Yahoo tracks the most frequently typed-in searches, whereas Google lists the year’s most popular movers, meaning search terms that gained the most popularity compared to the year before.

Nationally, searches involving God beat out Britney Spears, according to Google Trends data for 2007.

Other topics, such as “immigration,”"Iraq” and “global warming,” were blips on the radar compared with Spears, WWE and Paris Hilton on the national level.

Yahoo did not have geographically specific search results for Tucson, but a Google Trends comparison showed searches from Tucson differed slightly from Yahoo’s national Top 10 list. Yahoo’s top three were Spears, WWE and Hilton, but Tucson Internet users were more interested in immigration and Iraq.

Internet search terms can tell a lot about the social and cultural climate of a region, said Matthias Mehl, a University of Arizona psychologist whose research focuses on the role that the Internet plays in social and personal development.

“If we look at regional patterns, it is one way to study expressions of an atmosphere of a certain environment,” Mehl said. “We know that the personality of different states is different.”

States and cities are categorized by psychologists into the “Big Five,” categories, Mehl said. The Big Five concept was developed in the 1970s by psychologists as a way to identify personal character traits, but over time the model has been propagated to cities and regions. The Big Five are: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

Over the years, researchers have periodically collected data from survey participants and organized it by ZIP code to generalize characteristics of populations. Northeastern states, such as New York, tend to fall under the “neurotic” and “openness” category more than the more “agreeable” Southern states. Internet search data can be used to verify or challenge these assumptions, or identify new trends, Mehl said.

“From there, I think it’s easy to make a leap on how this can affect communities. If New York is highly neurotic, then people would be more inclined to search for self-help courses or things related to self-improvement,” said Mehl.

Arizona is “somewhere in the middle – it’s not a stereotype” of any of the other states, Mehl said. “We’re pretty high on conscientiousness, hard-working and organized. We’re pretty low on neuroticism, pretty emotionally stable.”

The fact that God beat out pop-culture icons like Britney and Paris is evidence that people everywhere are interested in the role religion can play in life and current events, said Scott Richards, host of the nationally-syndicated Bible Q&A radio show “Scott Richards Live!”

“Because the Internet is the ultimate marketplace of ideas with very little sense of censorship, there is this ability to allow this flow of human interest, and one of the most important things is a hunger and thirst to know God in a personal way,” said Richards, senior pastor of Calvary Christian Fellowship of Tucson.

Richards’ program’s Web site, scottrichardslive.com, gets hits from around the world, and there is a specific interest about how God and the Bible play into current events, especially with attention focused on the Middle East.

As for the national fixation with Spears, Richards said it’s just part of human nature.

“Quite candidly, people enjoy watching a train wreck,” Richards said. “They always slow down when there’s an accident on the side of the road. People enjoy watching the mighty fall.”

What we’re looking for

Net Searchers Like God Over Britney – Barely

Breaking News

Streaming Video

Images and Photos

Space Exploration

Science and Research

Technology

My Health