John Lennon once said, referring to the Beatles, “ We’re more popular than Jesus.” At dinner last night someone said that Michael Jackson was more popular than the Beatles. That surprised me. Was Michael Jackson more popular than Jesus? Google hits, as of this morning:
- Beatles: 54,400,000
- Jesus Christ: 47,600,000
- Michael Jackson: 41,600,000
For comparison:
- Barack Obama: 95,800,000
- Harry Potter: 93,200,000
- Brad Pitt: 28,200,000
Does that make J. K. Rowling (6,600,000 Google hits) the most powerful person in the world? Unlike President Obama, she can say whatever she wants. And she speaks to the most impressionable people in the world.
Very rhetorical post. Of course you need to sample the google hits over a longer time frame to get a sample less biased by the hot topic of the moment.
Also, if one isolates Jesus and Christ the numbers skyrocket. 220,000,000 for Jesus alone and 131,000,000 for Christ alone. A larger natural language processing study would be required to understand the context of using just Jesus, or just Christ to determine the frequency of relevance and how that compares with the Beatles.