More loose science Google mining today, starting with a sampling of the five major next generation portable gaming systems. I’m a little surprised — the Nintendo DS comes out on top, even over the Sony PSP. My guess is science is failing us here, as another query for “playstation portable” pulls up another 666,000 hits (oooweeoooh), which added to the to the “sony psp” results brings us up to 1,425,000, or about 200k over Nintendo. My guess is it’s somewhere in between those numbers and it’s fair to say the Nintendo DS and the PSP are, buzz-wise, in a dead heat. The Nokia N-Gage QD makes a sizeable showing, which is pretty respectable until you run just “n-gage,” which nets a response of over 4 million. Since we’re trying to compare next generation unreleased and just-released hardware, though, I left those results out. The Gizm(welovepigs)ondo is just a blip on the radar, in part because of the recent name change, and in part because it is doomed to failure. The Tapwave Zodiac doesn’t fare any better, which is a bit disappointing. Time to rally the troops, Tapwave.
The next Google Buzz Index, where we see which of the possible names for the second iteration of Microsoft’s Xbox have the highest buzz, is after the jump.
‘Xbox 2,’ even though it is the clear winner, may not end up being the official name, if rumors about Microsoft’s reticence to push a ‘2’ console in a generation where the Playstation will be a ‘3’ end up being true. The Pepsiesque ‘Xbox Next’ has a solid lead among the anumeric crew, beating out the ‘Xbox Xenon’ idea that Engadget and others have espoused. Xenon isn’t a bad name, really, it’s just the ‘Xbox Xenon’ doesn’t quite have the rhythm that ‘Xbox Next’ pulls off. The other two, ‘next generation Xbox’ and ‘next gen Xbox’ are just in there for flavor — obviously Microsoft has something better than that up its sleeve than that.
As always, the left column (vertical) has the product name, the inside left column (horizontal) has the exact query, quotes or no, we used to query Google, so feel free to check our results. Attempts are made to use similar search terms to provide the most accurate comparisons, but sometimes it’s not as clear as we’d like. This isn’t science, but feel free to treat it like it is in forum flame wars or whatever.
Related
Google Buzz Index: QWERTY Smartphone Messagers and Ultralight Hybrids [Gizmodo]
https://gizmodo.com/google-buzz-index-qwerty-smartphone-messagers-and-ultr-15786
