How Should Fame Be Measured Quantitatively?

Eric Schulman
Alexandria, Virginia

1. Introduction
    Researchers have attempted to quantitatively measure fame as far back in history (e.g., Schulman 1999a) as the last millenium (e.g., Schulman 1999b). Others, however, have been unable to understand the value of such efforts (e.g., Spamer 1999).
    We began our study in order to determine how fame changes with time, but ended up discovering a better method of quantitatively measuring fame. We are, of course, going to write the paper as if this is what we had set out to do from the beginning.

2. Methods
    We used five World Wide Web search engines to to determine how many web pages mention the eight people--and one musical group--chosen for our study. The five were AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/), Excite (http://www.excite.com/),  Google (http://www.google.com/), Lycos (http://www.lycos.com/), and Northern Light (http://www.northernlight.com/). The searches were performed on 16 August 2001. By the older author (in case you were wondering).

3. Results
    The number of web pages that each search engine found that mention each of the eight people--and one musical group--in our study can be found in Table 1. The table also includes the 9 March 1999 results from Schulman (1999b) for comparison.
    The less massive author suggested that fame should be presented on a logarithmic scale for clarity, and the taller author concluded that decibels would be an easily-understood logarithmic scale. Hence, the fame in Table 1 is given in dBLw, where fame(dBLw)= 10*log[fame(Lw)]. A Lewinsky (Lw) is, of course, a measure of fame equal to that of Monica Lewinsky. These values are tabulated in Table 1 and shown in Figure 1.

4. Discussion
    Although AltaVista was the method of choice of the previous study (Schulman 1999b, in case you had forgotten), an examination of the data--by the authors born on 16 December--revealed two major problems. First, it seemed very unlikely that Boris Yeltsin would be 3.55 times as famous as Bill Gates and 92.3% as famous as Jesus Christ. Second, Alta Vista did not satisfy the Lennon Theorem (1966), which states that The Beatles are "more popular than Jesus."
    Lycos and Northern Light also fail to satisfy the Lennon Theorem. Excite does satisfy the Lennon Theorem, but it significantly overstates the fame of Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Nadia Comaneci, and Earle Spamer. No reasonable person could believe that Bill Gates is 60 times more famous than Jesus Christ, or that Earle Spamer is as much as one two-hundredth as famous as Monica Lewinsky.
    Google, however, does satisfy all the relevant criteria.

5. Conclusion
    Google should be the search engine of choice for researchers making quantitative measurements of fame.

References
  Lennon, J. 1966, London Evening Standard, March 4.
  Schulman, E. 1999a, A Briefer History of Time (W.H. Freeman and Company).
  Schulman, E. 1999b, "Can Fame Be Measured Quantitatively?" AIR, 5, 3, 16.
  Spamer, E. 1999, "Should Fame Be Measured Quantitatively?" AIR, 5, 3, 17.