Programmatically determine the relative "popularities" of a list of items (books, songs, movies, etc

Posted by Horace Loeb on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Horace Loeb
Published on 2010-06-02T22:13:26Z Indexed on 2010/06/02 22:34 UTC
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Given a list of (say) songs, what's the best way to determine their relative "popularity"?

My first thought is to use Google Trends. This list of songs:

  1. Subterranean Homesick Blues
  2. Empire State of Mind
  3. California Gurls

produces the following Google Trends report: (to find out what's popular now, I restricted the report to the last 30 days)

Empire State of Mind is marginally more popular than California Gurls, and Subterranean Homesick Blues is far less popular than either.

So this works pretty well, but what happens when your list is 100 or 1000 songs long? Google Trends only allows you to compare 5 terms at once, so absent a huge round-robin, what's the right approach?

Another option is to just do a Google Search for each song and see which has the most results, but this doesn't really measure the same thing

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