Sunday, May 26, 2024

National BBQ day vs World Quantum Day

 After my post on different holiDAYS, here, such as Talk like a Pirate Day, and Raegan Revor day, two other Days were brought to my attention

1) Lance emailed me about National BBQ day, which is May 16. See here

2) While at a Quantum Computing Prelim I saw a poster for World Quantum Day, which is April 14. See here.

The obvious question: Which of these days is better known? I Googled them again but this time note the number of hits. 

I found out that Google seems to have removed that feature!

When using Google on both Firefox and Chrome, I did not get number of hits. 

Some points about this

1) Is there a way to turn the number-of-hits feature on?

2) Bing DOES give number of hits.

World Quantum Day: 899,000 hits

National BBQ Day: 418,000 hits

To get a baseline I binged Pi Day. This did not reveal the number of hits. An unscientific set of Bing searches seems to indicate that if the number of hits is large then they are not shown.

Is hits-on-Bing a good measure of popularity? I do not know.

3) Duck Duck Go does not give number of hits. This might be part of their privacy policy.

4) I also noticed a while back that You Tube no longer allows DISLIKES, just likes. That may explain why my Muffin Math song on You Tube (see here), with Lance on the Piano,  has 0 dislikes. It does not explain why it got  19 likes.

5) Google said that the number-of-hits is really an approximation and one should not take it too seriously. 

YouTube said that (not in these words) the haters caused dislikes to be far more than they should be.

On the one hand, I want to know those numbers. On the other hand I think Google and YouTube are right about about the numbers not being that accurate. And more so for Bing which is used less so (I assume) has less data to work from.

6) Back to my question: What is better known National BBQ day or World Quantum Day? The nation and the world may never know. 

7) All of the above is speculation.





5 comments:

  1. Though I would take BBQ over Quantum any day, it wasn't about the BBQ. It was an email I sent to Bill on May 16th to point out that every day is a day. Today is National Paper Airplane Day for instance.

    If every day is special than none of them are.

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  2. haha. let's not apply this reasoning to our academic children, and grand children .... or should we?

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  3. > And more so for Bing which is used less so (I assume) has less data to
    > work from.

    I believe you are confusing visits and hits. Hits are the number of webpages that contain the term. So, has nothing to do with how many people search for a term.

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  4. (bill) AH- that raises the question, is Number-of-webpages-that-contain-a-term a good indicator of how well known that term is?

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    Replies
    1. I don't know. There is also the Ngram Viewer: https://books.google.com/ngrams/

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