Graeme Souness and Jurgen Klinsmann have come out and criticized Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez during the past week, but now it’s the turn of Google. Well, kind of.
If you go to the Google homepage and start typing in Rafa Benitez’s name, the search engine displays suggestions based on the most popular searches made by users across the Internet.
So when you start typing in Rafa’s name, the suggestions that appear (pictured above) include:
- Rafa Benitez quits,
- Rafa Benitez transfer history,
- Rafa Benitez sacked,
- Rafa Benitez rant,
- Rafa Benitez fired, and
- Rafa Benitez jokes.
The suggested searches are not too kind to Benitez, are they? Possibly the only positive suggestion is “Rafa Benitez quotes” and even then that’s not such a great confidence boost because searchers are presumably looking for Benitez’s crazy rants.
Rafa is another bad guy to fail in Liverpool FC
His players are still kings, going top play the World Cup in South Africa
Thank you Sepp Blatter…
Incidentally his Google doesn’t come up too favorably either, but then we can all understand that one.
Maybe it’s just football that isn’t coming up too well for Google.
Gaffer,
I wonder if that phenomenon is also true of:
1) All managers; or
2) Under-fire managers.
I’ve tried it with Google Canada and the searches for Arsene and Sir Alex are slightly more complementary, though Arsene is linked with children in an, um, unfortunate way in one of the most common searches. But other under-fire managers like Gary Megson come up very much like Rafa’s. So, for me, it is hard to tell if Google (or, more correctly, Google users) is/are taking a personalized shot at Rafa or whether it is just a product of hard times at Anfield.
I wonder if the search results are different for Google.ca versus Google.com versus Google.co.uk?
Jon, I searched for Alex Ferguson in Google, and the suggestions Google made were definitely more positive such as “salary,” “biography,” “book” and, of course, “hairdryer treatment.”
In answer to your question Jon, the suggestions are fueled by the most common searches people do in Google. For Rafa’s suggestions, it looks like there are tons of people searching for negative things about Rafa. Looks like that trend will continue after the results from the last two weeks.
Cheers,
The Gaffer
The list you get is also a factor of your own previous searches. So, if the Gaffer had actually clicked on “rafa benitez quits” in an earlier iteration of the same search, then when he came back to do the printscreen, that result would be displayed top. Is it possible that some of this went on? When I do the same search, I get a lot of the same results, but in different order. “rafa benitez wiki” is actually shown as #2 on mine, and that doesn’t appear at all on your list, Gaff.
I retract my above comment. My observations were from using the google search on the google toolbar (not the google home page). They apparently behave differently – and display different “top similar/suggested searches”.
Nice to see someone actually retract a statement when they were wrong. I nominate you for comment of the week…serious!
yeah arsene wenger’s Isn’t too good.. oh well.
I think you all need to get out more
Its fake.
Just try it yourself.
Andy, Google continually updates their listings hourly and by region, so depending when and where you log in from, you’ll see different suggestions. This is what I saw this past weekend (above). It’s not fake.
Cheers,
The Gaffer
Shooting fish in a barrel