Chicagoans are constantly searching for their buses — or Googling for the CTA’s bus tracker, rather. According to the all-knowing search engine, “CTA bus tracker” was the second-most searched term unique to the city of Chicago this year.
The bus tracker came in right behind searches for the Chicago Public Schools’ Web interface, IMPACT, and edged out the third most popular search, police insider blog Second City Cop. Transit-riding Googlers looking to utilize all of Chicago’s transportation resources rounded out the top four with searches for the RTA’s trip planner, Goroo.
But why didn’t searches for “Michael Jackson” or “Blagojevich” make the list? The reason, Google says, is that the list’s goal was to find searches specific to the Chicago area.
“To compile these local lists, we found the most popular searches for each selected city and then ranked them based on how unique they were to that city,” Google explains. “A query is ‘unique’ if it is disproportionately popular in a particular city compared to the rest of the country.”
Jake Parillo at Google’s Chicago office explained to Chicagoist why local bigwigs like Mayor Daley and the Chicago Tribune didn’t make the list.
“They were weighted too heavily outside of the city (searchers for Blago are really from around the globe) or in the Tribune's case, most people don't search for it,” Parillo told Chicagoist.
That explains why transportation items were often among the most searched around the country. “collegetown shuttle” was the top search in Baltimore, and “trimet trip planner” was the top search in Portland, Oregon.
To check out the full lists, head over to Google’s Zeitgeist 2009.