L.A. Times Media analyst misinterprets Web numbers for Clinton and the first Bush

You have to be careful about Web popularity. Sometimes it means something, and sometimes it doesn’t.

A good example of how not to do it is provided today by Tim Rutten, the L.A. Times’ media analyst, who should know better. He points out that people are a lot more interested in ex-President Bill Clinton than in ex-President George H.W. Bush (the current president’s father). No doubt that’s true. And Rutten notes that more books have been written on Clinton than Bush. But Rutten continues:

If you type Bill Clinton’s name into the popular Google Internet search engine, it reports 37,100,000 entries. By contrast, the man Clinton first defeated to win the White House, George H.W. Bush, gets just 1,910,000.

There are couple of problems here. One is that a lot of Web sites on Bush the Elder go under “George Bush.” I did a quick Google search of: “George Bush” -“George W. Bush”. Note the minus sign in there, which, in Google’s calculations, removes any references to that name. It gave me another 7,840,000 entries. No doubt some of those entries are for the son. But the ones at the top are for the father. And those result would exclude many sites about both the father and the son.

Another factor is that Clinton’s presidency progressed as the Internet blossomed, with 1994 being the year of the beginning of mass Internet popularity. After that, meaning the last six years of Clinton’s presidency, everything he did was parsed by numerous Internet sites. The first President Bush was president when only a few tech geeks were on the Net.

It’s another example of the innumeracy of most journalists, your humble blogger excepted, constant blog reader.

One must be careful with such numbers, something a media analyst should know in 2007.