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Google has a tradition of releasing cool tools and widgets as part of their labs program. The latest special search category they’re released is Google Trends which lets you enter searches and see how many people have previously searched for the same term. After playing around with it for a while it becomes fairly obvious that Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man are more searched for than any other comicbook superhero. Nothing unsurprising there, but it’s still quite a leap from those A-list heroes to the B-listers like the Fantastic Four, Wonder Woman, and the Hulk. Even the X-Men don’t make it to the A-list based on those figures.
Above is a graph of the A-List heroes ( blue = Batman, red = Superman, yellow = Spider-Man ) search levels over the last few years for searches within the United States. The high yellow peak in 2004 is Spider-Man 2, the high blue peak (D) in 2005 is Batman Begins. It’s hard to draw definitive conclusions from this graph, but notice the fall off after both movies – a class exponential fall. It looks like movie have a very well defined pattern of interest – a gentle increase for a few months before release, then a sharp upward spike accompaning the actual release, and an exponential decay that tails off back to normal about 4-6 months later. What is interesting is that while Batman Begins didn’t peak as highly as Spider-Man 2 it kept interest in the character elevated longer by having a bigger spike from the DVD release (point F).
The other labelled points are pulled from the Google News database — the only one of real interest is C, the death of Christopher Reeve. Something else I noticed was that the balance between the Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins peaks shifts from country to country with most showing far more interest in the webslinger than in the dark knight.
What isn’t shown from the scaling is that searches for Superman have been ever so slowly increasing month-on-month for the last two years. This could be good for the run up to Superman Return and is quite reassuring considering that there is an entire generation of non-comics reading children who won’t have had much exposure to Superman beyond his cartoon appearances.
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