What if Google searches were used to award points in the Eurovision Song Contest? And how close is this prediction based on search activity to the real Song Contest’s outcome?
The Eurovision Song Contest is one of the biggest popularity contests in the world. Anyone in one of the 41 competing countries can vote for their favourite song through a continent wide televoting system. But today, popularity can also be measured in another way: by counting online searches. So, how close was the Eurosearch Song Contest to the Eurovision Song Contest?
The ranking
If countries awarded points based on search activity for other countries’ contestants, using Eurovision’s famous 12-point voting system, the ranking would look like this:
Final winner Duncan Laurence from the Netherlands was fourth in the ranking based on search activity and Russia is third on both the search and the overall ranking. But the most searched participants, from France and Iceland, did not end up high in the televoting and overall ranking. People probably searched for those candidates for other reasons than liking their songs and considering awarding them a televote. Norway won the televoting, which was also not picked up by search activity before the final.
On the map below, you can see which countries searched the most for the contestant of your country, and for which contestants your country searched the most. Switch to "Televoting" to compare search activity with the televoting results, and switch from the geographic map to the grid map to better represent smaller countries.