Friday, October 15, 2010

Searching for Jesus

Being a geek, I love numbers.  Google Trends can be a bit of a fix, and so just now I thought about looking into how often people search for Jesus.  You can see the outcome: http://www.google.com/trends?q=jesus&ctab=0&geo=gb&date=all&sort=0

I've limited this to the UK since that's where I'm based - if you go global, it's Latin American countries that seem to amass the most hits for Jesus.  Global or UK, there are two spikes in Google searches for Jesus, and perhaps unsurprisingly they are Christmas and Easter.

What interests me even more, although I can't put a finger on why, is where these searches took place.  Google gives a little breakdown, and it seems the place in the UK with the most seekers is Gateshead, funnily enough, closely followed by Farnborough.  Oxford comes in fifth, behind Cambridge in this particular Varsity match.  

The language is also intriguing: by far the most hits of searches for Jesus are not in English, even in the UK.  So is it that Farnborough and Gateshead have particularly high levels of immigrants from Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries?