Friday, September 12, 2008

Yahoo more popular than Google according to Google

What phrase when typed into google returns the most hits? I have some data here (may have changed by now) that I got just by googling things that seemed promising. If you can find a phrase that returns more hits than those listed here, in their categories, then leave a comment about it.

Any phrase that gets over 10,000,000,000.
  1. www: 25,670,000,000
  2. a: 20,080,000,000
  3. the: 17,040,000,000
  4. and: 14,420,000,000
  5. i: 10,100,000,000
Real words that get over 500,000,000.
  1. yahoo: 2,920,000,000
  2. google: 2,710,000,000
  3. english: 2,480,000,000
  4. sex: 851,000,000
Famous People that get over 85,000,000. (Perhaps we can define famous by some cutoff.)
  1. Washington: 550,000,000 (Cheating: has multiple meanings.)
  2. Jesus: 260,000,000
  3. Lincoln: 212,000,000
  4. Beatles: 88,200,000 (They once said they were more popular than Jesus". Not according to google.)
Words associated to Religions that get over 100,000,000.
  1. God: 677,000,000
  2. Christian: 507,000,000
  3. Bible: 183,000,000
  4. Islam: 147,000,000
  5. Catholic: 126,000,000
Common Names that get over 100,000,000.
  1. Smith: 456,000,000
  2. Jones: 327,000,000

23 comments:

  1. These numbers are just estimates. It would take too long for Google to determine the actual number of results returned by a query.

    How accurate are these estimates? No idea.

    ReplyDelete
  2. some other google estimates:

    1: 25,300,000,000

    USA: 1,540,000,000

    britney: 133,000,000
    Madonna: 131,000,000
    Bush: 305,000,000

    yes: 1,100,000,000
    no: 8,300,000,000

    ReplyDelete
  3. "com" has 25,780,000,000 -- more than "www", and "of"is between "the" and "and"; "myspace" and "youtube" are more popular than "sex", the latter crossing 1B.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Jesus is not on your list of terms relating to religion that have greater then 100,000,000

    jesus has 260,000,000 which is greater then 100,000,000

    therefore Jesus isn't a term relating to religion according to Gasarch.

    ReplyDelete
  5. if yahoo and google count as words, blog could be counted, too

    blog 3,510,000,000

    ReplyDelete
  6. estimated size of google index

    http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/

    it's estimated to be around 20 billion - I wonder how they can have 25 billion results

    ReplyDelete
  7. Lee gets 436,000,000, and Park gets 984,000,000 -- both far more than Smith or Jones. The large number of Asian WWW users helps here, I think, but also the multiple cultures in which the name is used in the first case and its use as a common noun in the second...

    ReplyDelete
  8. Also, 10,720,000,000 for day. This is fun! (But fun only gets 1,010,000,000...)

    ReplyDelete
  9. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  10. it's estimated to be around 20 billion

    Those numbers are well below actual values. Google has 100 billion pages in its index, out of 1 trillion valid URLs that it has in its database.

    ReplyDelete
  11. continuing the record established by anon #3 ("com" in the "all phrases" category), we now offer... in the "real words" category (excluding articles and prepositions and such):

    "home" has 7,080,000,000 hits, and
    "page" has 8,250,000,000 hits.

    ReplyDelete
  12. "data" has 3,570,000,000 - more than yahoo and google

    ReplyDelete
  13. computer scientist / complexity theorist "cook" is more popular than "jesus" -- 300,000,000 hits!

    ReplyDelete
  14. Can we subscribe to this blog minus "GASARCH" ?

    ReplyDelete
  15. to anon#14:

    if all you could do after reading an article is to post an insult to this author, we'd rather have this blog minus trolls like you.

    consider contributing usefully, or vanish, or start your own blog.

    ReplyDelete
  16. i second #14. #15 is an idiot

    no offense to B.G. but his posts are quite different in nature than Lance's posts. I am subscribed to this blog b/c i wanna read Lance. Maybe the blog should be split, or at the very least, tagged so that people who want to just read one author can subscribe to the authors feed.

    ReplyDelete
  17. "www OR Com OR a" gets 25.84G hits. A 30G search would be interesting...

    ReplyDelete
  18. A related challenge: Come up with a word shorter than 6 characters that does not produce any results.

    ReplyDelete
  19. I think you should also count number of their translations in other languages, otherwise you are just counting words not meanings.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Silly web searches aside, I would like to bring attention of all CS folks to the Youtube video lectures posted by the IITs (Indian inst. of techs). They are available here:

    http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=nptelhrd

    ReplyDelete
  21. I like both Lance and Bill posts, but in case you do want to subscribe to a "Lance-only" version I created such a feed here:

    http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=aNifV3iJ3RGXPXhLBR50VA&_render=rss

    To see how I did it and/or clone it to create your own variant, go here:

    http://pipes.yahoo.com/oddhead/complexitylance

    ReplyDelete
  22. video: 3,460,000,000
    photo: 2,480,000,000
    image: 2,200,000,000
    book: 1,590,000,000

    ReplyDelete