The whole world has caught football fever as the 2014 World Cup takes place in Brazil. As you may expect, the internet has exploded with news, speculation and videos of diving Dutchmen.
Google has also joined in with the fun with daily Doodles on it’s homepage, even celebrating Father’s Day with a football themed Daddy and baby ‘O’s off to a match.
Knowledge Graph has also been utilised this tournament allowing users to view essential stats, player profiles, kick off times and TV broadcast information in organic search results in real time –a much more complicated application than usual.
Interestingly enough, this seems to be the first instance I’m aware of where Knowledge Graph has provided an external link to a private, for-profit organisation (FIFA), as well as cards being branded with the official tournament logo and not just a link to said organisation’s Google + page.
In its quest to become “the answer engine”, Google (.com) has also provided links to video highlights from each match via ESPN.
Google Trends has launched a special World Cup hub for 2014 and has been tracking the 443.2 million searches and counting with just 12 games played so far. The Trends hub is posting playful search insight using its geo-targeting data. Here are a few of my favourites:
- As Spain calculates its next move, combined searches for the team’s top defenders are twice as high than those for its top attackers.
- In a game that went all Germany’s way, Müller’s hat-trick scored three times more local searches than Pepe’s head-butt
- Even with the NBA Finals still in progress, USA searches are ten times higher for the World Cup.
- England searched more for David Luiz’s rumoured haircut than for their next opponent, Italy.
Not unexpectedly when looking at UK search trends from the last three tournaments, peak search volume and perpetuation for [World Cup] correlated with how long it took for England to get knocked out.
Another trend that sees a four year cycle of peaks and troughs is that of Panini stickers. The brand’s average monthly searches more than quadrupled on this time last year as shown below:
Keyword; Panini
With an increasing number of adults reviving their childhood pastime it seems it’s not just the players that act like children when it comes to the beautiful game…