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by sparky_z 2578 days ago
It's not "The person people from Lansing searched the most." It's "the person from Lansing that people search the most". Worldwide, Larry Page is certainly more of a public figure than Magic Johnson.
3 comments

"Worldwide, Larry Page is certainly more of a public figure than Magic Johnson."

This is HN bubble thinking.

Very few regular people know who 'Larry Page' is.

Almost everyone knows who 'Magic Johnson' is.

Have a look at Google search trends.

Not really. This is people looking at Wikipedia.

Guess: Who's the Alan with the most pageviews in Wikipedia? Who's the Steve?

I left the answers here:

- https://medium.com/towards-data-science/bigquery-without-a-c...

Basically a show-off for BigQuery, but to answer this specific question: The most viewed Alan and Steve in Wikipedia are the ones closer to HN.

    SELECT title, SUM(views) views
    FROM `fh-bigquery.wikipedia_v3.pageviews_2019`
    WHERE DATE(datehour) BETWEEN '2019-01-01' AND '2019-01-10'
    AND wiki='en'
    AND title LIKE r'Alan\_%'
    GROUP BY title
    ORDER BY views DESC
    LIMIT 10
"Worldwide, Larry Page is certainly more of a public figure than Magic Johnson."

Is what I responded to.

Don't misconstrue how much people do not care about business people, and how much they do care about sports figures.

Nobody in my family knows who Larry Page is.

Ok, I see.

Just for fun:

- In Silicon Valley... Magic Johnson has more google searches than Larry Page.

- In India... Larry Page has more google searches than Magic Johnson.

- https://imgur.com/a/KwQ5wJt

Just checking Google Trends, as you suggested...

Larry > Magic might be the HN bubble, but Magic > Larry definitely is the US bubble.

Most of the world does not care about basketball at all.

Except China. I’m always asked about the NBA when I visit China, and I know nothing about basketball.
In the US, the number one Larry that is a rival to Magic is not even Larry Page.
> The most viewed Alan and Steve in Wikipedia are the Silicon Valley ones.

You had me well baffled with this - who is the "Silicon Valley Alan"? The only candidate I could think of was Alan Kay who, with all respect, was never likely to be the most-viewed of all Alans.

(Turns out to mean Alan Turing - I don't think he had any connection with Silicon Valley)

Oops, edited for clarity/intentions to "closer to HN".
Actually, no Larry Page isn't according to their stats [1].

So either it's a stats bug, or Magic Johnson is missing a link at all to Lansing in their data.

[1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.or...

They are using category pages like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_East_Lans... to determine the links. Larry Page is in there, while Magic Johnson is in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Dana_Poin...
Except that it's really "person whose Wikipedia page references Lansing searched the most," which is how you end up with Phil Knight (an Oregon native who started a company famously headquartered in Oregon, and continues to donate huge amounts of money to an Oregon university) for La Quinta, CA, a suburb of Palm Springs in which he happens to have a house.