You know how it is, we have all been there. You are sitting there while the IT guy is warbling away about the New Windows 7 and how the updated Graphical User Interface and improved memory management will result in greater performance and you have two thoughts. The first thing to come to mind is would it be possible to beat him to death with the heel of my stiletto and make it look accidental. The second is who is the most hated person at the moment.
Luckily, we have google to find out the answer to the second one. Using the Words 'I Hate...', we can find out by looking at the number of hits to get a snapshot of who the Internet is hating at the moment and it is quite eye opening.
Most hated Person? Obama with 28,500,000 hits, 4 million in front of Bush who scored 24,100,000 hits. Of today's bogeymen, Saddam scored 997,000, Bin Laden 878,000 and Castro 712,000 while Ahmadinejad is relatively loved with a lowly 303,000. Special mention to the Pope who scored 2,000,000, just a few hundred thousand behind Hitler.
Most hated country? Sorry America, you came top with 45,500,000 and it's a North American double with Canada second hated with 30,700,000. England came in with 14,800,000 but we were still not as disliked as Australia who were hated by 16,100,000.
Most hated nationality? Americans had better start singing the 'nobody likes us song' because they are the most hated nationality with 37,500,000 haters on the Web which is more than double the next most hated who are Indians with 16,800,000 and then Australians on 16,300,000 who beat the English by 200,000.
Most hated religion? Easily the most hated with 16,600,000 was the Christians, then Jews with 3,200,00, 1,100,000 Muslims then Hindus 681,000 just sneak in front of the Buddhists 667,000.
Most hated musical style? Hip Hop's 7,370,000 beat Punks 4,160,000 to top spot. Country & Western scored a lowly 1,150,000.
Most hatred partner? 16,300,000 for i hate my wife, 8,660,000 for i hate my husband.
7 comments:
Good grief, Bush must be pissed off... the one area of life that he must have thought he had the beating of Obama... and it turns out Obama's the winner here too!
Also, it cracks me up how hated Australia is. How much of this is the lingering effect of John Howard? Or Daniel?... And I wonder how many of these websites are based in New Zealand? :)
Lucy,
You are so funny. What a great source! A Google search... that is funniest.
Potential search engine flaws:
First of all Google indexes all data on the web but only gives access to about 70% so you may have missed a lot of hatred. On the other hand, search engines don't filter "old" data or redundant data so you may have over estimated hate.
Potential "personal-issue" flaws:
Did you consider that of the 45M hits, 30M likely came from far-left Americans while W was president, and the other 15M likley came from far-right Americans now that O (is this an ohhh or a zero - hard to tell) is president? In other words is this just American self-hatred. I "hate" to imagine that such an uneducated, backward, unsophisticated emotion such as hate exists anywhere else in the world but America.
Potential far-lefter bias:
Did you consider that since the American far-lefters are most often unemployed, so they had time and the motivation to say they hate America because of W every hour of every day for 8 whole years... which skews the data. 24 x 7 x 365 x 8 = 490,000 hate messages per far-lefter. The far-righters being business owners can now order their employees to post hate messages every hour of every day (I'll have to stew over this idea...).
Finally...
Potential language flaws:
Did you do a search in other languages like Australian, or Russian, or Chinese, or French, or German, or Spanish, or Hindi, or Urdu, or Irish? Hmmm, did you?
Come on, a journalist like yourself should understand all about random sampling...
Now if you had done a global phone survey...
Q
Isn't it handy that the word 'pedantry' can now be defined using only one letter? ;)
Cheezy,
How Cheezy of you to notice. Now my signature will be long...
If one is going to claim credibility via facts, don't you think the facts should be credible instead of incredible?
Pedantriest
I don't know what my problem is Cheezy but since they foistered Home and Away onto us, i just like to beat Australia at everything.
Q, i think a targeted google search is a great way of getting a quick and dirty snapshot of the mood of the times. It isn't an exact science but you do get a ball park figure from a massive sample size.
"Most hated reptile..."
"Alligators, (well, at least by Kvatch)"
Sorry, doesn't really work without my picture, but if you click my profile, you'll get it.
I live in Thailand and even the easy going Thais hate Americans. Easily the world's most hated nationality - although not surprising seeing what the US government has done in the last 50 years.
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