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Ranchers.net

Curious Canadians seek state on Web
UA outscores Auburn in Google searches
Saturday, August 19, 2006
STAN DIEL
News staff writer
There's no neighborhood there called "Little Birmingham." No satellite campus for the University of Alabama. Not even a Dreamland franchise. But the people of Vancouver, British Columbia, have a pretty intense interest in Alabama, nonetheless.

The people of Canada, more than people anywhere else outside the United States, use the Internet to search for the word "Alabama," according to an analysis of Google searches made since 2003. And the people of Vancouver - which is north of Seattle, two time zones and nearly a continent away - search more for "Alabama" than any other Canadians.

Anna Lilly, a spokeswoman for Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan, said she had no idea what was driving Vancouverites to look up Alabama on the Web.
"That is very curious," she said. "You've stumped me."

The snapshot of searches for "Alabama" was made using Google Trends, a tool that measures Internet activity and that was created to help Google engineers manage Web traffic. But it's also an increasingly popular way to kill time and ferret out useless trivia.

A search for both "University of Alabama" and "Auburn University," for example, shows that if the Iron Bowl were a Web-surfing contest rather than a football game, Auburn wouldn't stand a chance.

On only a handful of occasions since 2003, when the Google data tracking begins, did more people search for Auburn than UA. Auburn left UA in the dust on Jan. 3, 2005, when Auburn beat Virginia Tech 16-13 in the Sugar Bowl, securing both an undefeated season and a record number of Google searches.
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