Quick! Finish the end of this sentence: “The Winter Olympics are…” Exciting? Entertaining? The only thing on TV this week?
It’s been easy to get sucked into the drama of the world’s top athletes competing on an international stage with a number of story lines emerging as the games unfold. Whether it was Meryl Davis and Charlie White winning the first ever U.S. gold in Olympic Ice Dancing, or Dominique Gisin of Switzerland and Slovenia’s Tina Maze tying for gold in the women’s downhill, there have been a number of feel-good stories already developing within the Games. On the other hand, some story lines have been far from uplifting such as America’s Shaun White falling out of medal contention and being dethroned as King of the Olympic Halfpipe, or Bob Costas’ inexplicable bout of conjunctivitis due to what some reporters have deemed to be abysmal hotel accommodations. Throughout it all, there has been enough within the games to provide us with continued drama and intrigue. And it’s for this reason that it’s easy for people to become engrossed and constantly have the Games on our minds.
But what about, well, non-people? Here at Overdrive, we’re constantly monitoring search engine results pages for our paid and organic search clients in a constantly evolving effort to understand how the engines think so as to maximize positioning within search engine results pages. So it would stand to reason (to us, anyway), what do search engines think of the Olympics? With that in mind we took to the engines to see what they thought of as top auto-completes not only for the Games as a whole but for each of the individual Olympic Games.
What do search engine auto-completes think of the Winter Olympics?
The results are fascinating. In some cases, the auto-completes are spot-on, Luge is in-fact quite dangerous. But what about “Ski Jumping is not a crime?” Thank you, search engines for that eternal truth. And what about the Games themselves? Apparently there is some negative backlash against the games themselves. The real question is whether these auto-completes provide queries for which a searcher would actually search.
It just goes to show that while the Google, Bing and Yahoos of the world continue to try to understand human thinking and drive us to what they think we’re looking for, there’s still a level of human thought and understanding that machines can’t comprehend. In any event, it’s enough to provide some drama and intrigue of its own.
Here are a few favorite event snippets from the full infographic:
