Google's World Cup war room teases trends from tourney

SAN FRANCISCO — How hot was Thursday's USA vs. Germany World Cup soccer match? Online searches for it beat queries about the weather.

The game emerged as the most searched term in the nation on Google during the course of the USA's 1-0 loss to Germany, a result that nonetheless still finds Uncle Sam's army moving to the Brazilian tournament's next round.

But the world was curious, too: The game ranked fourth globally, after typically dominant searches for Facebook, YouTube and Google.

"There was all this talk before the tournament that Americans weren't interested in soccer, and that no one cared about the U.S. team, and we're able to use real-time data to show that's not the case," says Madeline Kane, a Google product marketing manager who took on the task of manning the World Cup Trends project.

"We just passed 1 billion searches for the Cup overall," she says. "We knew this would be a great opportunity to share information from a global conversation."

Teasing out trending statistics from the World Cup is the job of a few dozen soccer-mad Googlers, who since the tournament's onset have gathered in an airy work space provided by digital agency R/GA in a hip corner of town. Dubbed the World Cup War Room, the place buzzes with youth and caffeine, its soundtrack the chatter of TV commentators and the occasional barking of staffers' dogs.

Walls are papered with some of the 100 colorful trending factoids (found at google.com/worldcup) that are the numbers-crunching art-anchored work of the assembled team of engineers, artists, writers, many of them fluent in the 12 languages each blurb is translated into.

Immediately following the conclusion of the USA's game, which played on large screens concurrently with Portugal's 2-1 defeat of Ghana, two trending-fact cartoons were ordered up.

One touts the game's aforementioned top ranking as a search term, and the other is a nod to the 18x jump in global game-time searches for Ghana's striker Asamoah Gyan, whose tying goal in the Portugal match made him Africa's all-time World Cup scoring king, with six.

While Google has long been tabulating trending statistics, this Cup effort, which started last fall, required a group of engineers from the company's Israeli offices to build "a real-time tool that would allow us a look into samples of trending searches as they were happening," says Kane.

Among the quirkiest search trends from the tournament so far:

• After Uruguay's Luis Suarez bit an Italian player, there were 20 times more searches for his name than there were searches for snake, spider, tick, fly, dog and mosquito bites combined.

• When Ecuador's Christian Noboa wore a strange headpiece during a match against France, searches for the player jumped 13 times.

• Although Brazil's star player Neymar recently nabbed a yellow card during a game, Brazilian fans were unfazed and continued to search more about his yellow hair.

But one of the most shared World Cup search spikes is also one of its least expected. It concerns Germany's deft striker Mesut Ozil, who is of Turkish decent. Searches for the player in Germany were actually topped by searches for him in not only Turkey, but also Indonesia and Malaysia.

"It's one of those strange ones, but it turns out he's very active on social media, and has a big following in those countries, so when we shared that fact with the world, lots of people forwarded it," says Kane.

As the din from the USA game disappeared, the team chewed over the two most salient search trends from the match.

One was goalie Tim Howard eclipsing Clint Dempsey as the team's most searched player, no doubt the result of the stellar performance in keeping the Germany attackers largely at bay.

And the other related to tenacious defender Jermaine Jones, who enjoyed a tripling of searches in Germany — topping searches for any German player — after he suffered a violent collision with the game's referee. The headline? "A bump for Jermaine."

The coming weeks will bring more matches. The trending war room stands ready, algorithms and wit at the ready.