Celebrations of football have started as the FIFA World Cup 2018 has kicked off in Russia. Sports enthusiasts are turning to Google to stay updated about fixtures, match results, and their favorite players. To identify and visualize these search trends throughout the World Cup by leveraging Google Search Interest, Google has launched a project, How the World is Searching for the World Cup,
The project picks up data via Google Trends and assigns it to a topic by analyzing and anonymizing a random sample of searches. The data used belongs to the 32 national teams participating in the FIFA World Cup 2018 and 35 other countries where searches were sufficiently available for football matches in the past two years. This data can be viewed according to the search interests of a particular country. Let’s have a look on how Pakistan is searching for the World Cup?
While Brazil and Germany are neck-to-neck in the popularity of being the most searched team, it looks like Pakistan is rooting for Germany.
According to the worldwide search interest, before the World Cup 2018 kickstarted, Lionel Messi of Argentina stood at the top of the table for the most searched player and Mohammad Salah of Egypt secured the fifth spot. However, the search interests for Pakistan indicate that Christiano Ronaldo of Portugal enjoys more popularity than Messi. Moreover, Salah rises to the third spot while Neymar from Brazil goes down one spot for most searched players in Pakistan.
You can navigate through the data for different dates to observe the trends changing every day. In addition to the most searched team and players, you can also view the most searched teams in a respective round and which upcoming matches are enjoying more popularity.
This cool visualization tool is definitely a treat for football fans. It has been developed with the collaboration of Google News Initiative, Polygraph that publishes visual journalism, Alberto Cairo – Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami and Camilo Moreno Kuratomi – a Data Journalist.
