Comrades Marathon Blog

A debate frequently raised over a post time trial beer, is which race is bigger, Comrades or Two Oceans. In terms of number of entrants it’s no contest. In 2006, Two Oceans had 7770 entrants and Comrades had 11039. 2000 saw a record of 24 552 entrants to the Comrades Marathon, while Two Oceans’ record was in 2004, which had 9767.

So it’s clear, Comrades is a bigger race in terms of entrants, and in 2000, it was double the size. Inspired by Bill Tancer’s blog from Hitwise, I wondered how I could do the same type of analysis for Comrades and Two Oceans search terms. Then I remembered Google Trends, the tool from Google that provides, “insights into broad search patterns.” After playing around a bit, limiting the data to just South Africa, and 2005, you can see the result below.

The search queries, “Two Oceans” and “Comrades” only pick up around race time, and Comrades is clearly gathers more searches.

But what if “Marathon” decides to enter the battle:

As the graph shows, there are only slightly more searches for “Marathon” around Comrades, than when Two Oceans oceans is on. It’s pretty clear that South African Googlers are more interested in Comrades rather than the two oceans. However doesn’t seem to inspire anyone to search for marathon any more than Comrades does. Perhaps the distance of 56km is considered more a marathon than 87km, but who knows. I just thought this is interesting, make of it what you will.

I would have liked to have cross references search queries like, “Marathon Training Program” and others, but these didn’t yield enugh results for Google to give a result. The query “Marathon” is most likely broad, which means that other queries like “Marathon Training Program” will be matched, and summed in with the data.

Disclaimer: Google trends data are based on only a portion of searches, and approximated, so they’re not completely accurate, but should be pretty close.

technorati tags:comrades, two+oceans, marathon, google, google+trends

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