Comments on: Yale vs. Harvard: a Google Deathmatch

By: Harvard vs. Yale vs. Princeton: Facebook Fight | the Sam Jackson College Experience

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 04:03:18 +0000

[...] a month ago, I wrote about patterns I found comparing Yale and Harvard in Google searches through Google Trends. Well, just today, Facebook released a simply fascinating tool called “Lexicon” which [...]

By: Andrew Careaga

Andrew Careaga — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:59:55 +0000

Of course, I was being facetious about GoogleFight. It is no substitute for deeper analytical tools but it can be fun in a primal, “my site can beat up your site” sort of way.

By: Sam Jackson

Sam Jackson — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:36:40 +0000

GoogleFight just looks at how many hits in the index there are for a given keyword/phrase — so while there are more for Harvard, it’s not *necessarily* true that a proportionately larger amount of people are searching for Harvard on google.

Back in 2006 some blackhat spammers got 3-5 billion pages indexed by google in under 3 weeks… so… : )

By: Andrew Careaga

Andrew Careaga — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:31:00 +0000

Why not simply use Googlefight to compare the two schools?

By: Sam Jackson

Sam Jackson — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 04:28:36 +0000

@ James: I tried to check it against a neutral college term, but had trouble finding any that really matched traffic levels enough to show up meaningfully. Yale vs. College Admissions produces fairly similar shifts, but still not as tight of a connection as Y v H.

@Jill: Definitely, hooray! Good luck waiting for college news, I know it is tough (though I luckily did not have to wait as long as you did… although I wish I had been better able to, since then I could have compared aid offers and gotten more money. Flip side to the early coin at my school, I guess). I don’t do link exchanges per se but I try to highlight cool student bloggers when I can, and you’re always welcome to send linklove this way too… so… : )

By: James

James — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:49:35 +0000

Great work! I wonder what the graphs would look like if you switched out “Yale” for “college”. Aside from the fact that the scale would be way off (college >> Harvard or Yale, for that matter), my guess is that they would track well together. For example, there is always an uptrend in what looks like March/April for both schools; this probably has to do with college admission results being released around this time. I like your thoughts about the two schools tracking together because they both mimic (ahem, copy) one another, however.

By: Jill

Jill — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:11:18 +0000

Hey! Thanks for the encouragement! I appreciate it! I think I WILL keep blogging for a while.
Would you be interested in doing a link exchange of some sort?
-Jill