Monday, July 7, 2014

National search trends to predict 2014 World Cup results


Tomorrow, soccer fans will have the opportunity to watch World Cup semi-finals, and as usual closer is to the end, higher the heat of competition. At the beginning, Google has launched a special World Cup microsite that analyses how each country is feeling about their upcoming fixtures based on their search terms. If you never reviewed it, it is highly recommended to take a glance there before the most important games.

The World Cup trends page compares the search habits of two countries that are going to meet on the field, then uses a "newsroom" of engineers, analysts and writers to find interesting pull-out facts.

Additionally, the page lists standard trends for each of the matches happening in the tournament, which team is more popular worldwide, and the top World Cup-related questions on each side.

The newsroom serves up a "front page" of headline-worthy curios from the vast swathes of data streaming through Google's databanks. Helped in part by interactive agency R/GA London, the team of designers, search engineers and analysts put the data in context to give a small window into national feeling about each match-up.

This is explicitly quantified by the sentiment each country feels towards their national team on Google+. Status updates and posts from users in each country are analyzed for positive, neutral or negative reaction words in relation to their team and used to calculate how the country as a whole is feeling towards their next fixture.

For example, here are the searching trends for the semi-final match between Brazil and Germany.



And here is the picture for the next semi-final match between Nederland and Costa Rica.



Access the website through the link: http://www.google.com/trends/worldcup#/en-us/




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