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How Much The Internet Thinks Pop Stars Suck - By The Numbers

Evan Petersen

by Evan Petersen

Published March 6, 2014

Everybody knows that pop stars suck, but in order to quantify exactly how much they suck, we turned to Google search results. We wanted a to find tangible amount of pop star hatred, so we searched for exact phrases on the internet to see precisely how many times they occurred. You know, for science. The results may actually surprise you.

The first search term we used was "(Pop Star X) Sucks." We wanted to find out just how many times that phrase has been published on the internet. Justin Bieber is clearly the highest, clocking in at 1,720,000 occurrences of "Justin Bieber Sucks." No surprise there. "Kanye West Sucks," however, appeared a scant 88,400 times. We weren't sure whether to add the unique phrase "Kanye sucks" to the formula, so we gave him the benefit of the doubt and left the results as they were. The rest of our pop stars all floated around a quarter of a million, with Miley Cyrus at 283,000, Nicki Minaj at 152,000, and One Direction and Lady Gaga tied at 245,000.

Things take a strange turn, however, when you look at the number of Google search results containing the phrase "(Pop Star X) Is The Worst." Justin Bieber drops down to a downright-befuddling 358,000, and Kanye West shoots up to a respectable 1,030,000. Miley Cyrus remains at a comparable 230,000, while Nicki Minaj lands at 655,000. One Direction is the clear outlier here, with a staggering 11,700,000 uses of the phrase "One Direction Is The Worst." Justin Bieber may suck the most, but -- according to our cold, hard data -- One Direction is indisputably the worst. Lady Gaga rounds out our list with a fairly sizable 1,350,000.

justin-bieber-sucks-more-than-cancer

Lastly, as a control, we decided to pit Justin Bieber's numbers against something which unquestionably and universally sucks: cancer. The phrase "Cancer Sucks" appears online 905,000 times, a far cry less than Bieber's sizable 1,720,000. This means, of course, that Justin Bieber officially sucks more than cancer.

justin-bieber-retiring-retires-christmas

As an afterthought, we looked at another set of interesting data provided by Google Trends. We compared how many times people actually searched for these phrases on Google, and it provides insight into the timeline of each of these artist's careers in sucking. Kanye West has the highest spikes in searches, the biggest of which was in September of 2009, right around the time he interrupted Taylor Swift's VMA acceptance speech. Searches of the phrase "Justin Bieber Sucks" are on the rise, however, so watch your back Kanye. Check out the graph below.

google-trends-pop-stars-suck

We realize, of course, that this is an imprecise study -- we simply reported the number of results when searching these exact phrases on Google. We wanted to conduct a far more scientifically valid study, but multiple emails to Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye went unreturned.

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1096
artists
Justin Bieber Kanye West Lady Gaga Miley Cyrus Nicki Minaj One Direction
genres
Hip Hop Pop Pop Hip Hop
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