Alizée America Forum - When have people most Googled "Alizee Jacotey"?

When have people most Googled Alizée?
And what are the geographies and languages of such queries?

This is a REFINED version of the post I first made here.

I had wanted to keep it simple, because of the glaring lack of conversation generated by my post about the historical popularity of the baby name Alizée at Silly fun with names you'll want to read. (Aside: I'm rather sure that without Miss Jacotey, at the turn of the century there would have been hundreds of fewer French women pregnant with a baby they'd call Alizée, a stunning accomplishment no DOZEN sex-crazed Frenchmen could boast! ;) )

OK, then, let's be more sophisticated (and wordy) about Googling for Alizée.

1. First, it is remarkable that when you Google the UNquoted string

Alizée Jacotey

you are told "Your terms - Alizée Jacotey - do not have enough search volume to show graphs." Note that by omitting quotes you even admit pages where the two words need NOT be adjacent. Aren't you surprised by this null outcome?

2. Curiously, however, if you search WITHOUT THE DIACRITICAL MARK - as would, say, almost all non-francophones - you DO get results, without and even with the quotation marks at that! Here are these studies:

Alizee Jacotey

"Alizee Jacotey"

Many languages, with comparable frequencies, were used in making these queries. But Mexico leads the Regions list, and its cities the Cities list. Peru is another important participant in Latin America.

3. Now, if you examined my baby names page cited above, you learned that while "Alizée" was a novel name when AJ was born, it rapidly grew in popularity. And when Moi... Lolita became a hit, you can be sure every second publicist in the world wondered if he could convince people his client's name was ALSO Alizée - whether that was true or not! In fact, if today you use Google News to search for "Alizée", you are more likely to get a hit for a restaurant of that name or Mademoiselle Poulicek than the daughter of Ajaccio, nearly all the time. Sad, but true.

So studying the searches for the simple string "Alizée" might give misleading results. But perhaps that simple search is exactly what a typical Francophone might undertake, especially someone in France. Here are those results:

Alizée

In this case, the French language is overwhelmingly dominant, as are cities in France. France also leads the Regions list, followed closely by half-Francophone Belgium (are these almost all searches for Miss Belgium 2008, Mlle. Poulicek?), Mexico and partially-Francophone Switzerland. Note the peak at the end of 2007, when Psychédélices emerged. This persuades us that most of the charted activity reflects our favorite "Alizée." Note that unlike the previous searches, in this case there is also a non-null report on news item frequencies. There are multiple peaks of comparable amplitude, all during the year following the release of Psychédélices, and about a quarter-year apart. (To me, this seems to suggest there is a publicist paid by the quarter.)

4. One can try to resolve the potential "Poulicek problem" by getting rid of queries from Belgium, by restricting attention to France:

Alizée (France only)

The results are not very different, with one important exception: The long-term decline since the early part of the decade is more pronounced. There is even a time in early 2004 when the search intensity was higher than at the peak seen with the release of Psychédélices. On the lighter side, it is amusing that about a quarter of the queries from France came in English, rather than French. (It seems many anglophone expats are charmed by all of the Franglais which Alizée is generous enough to use.) Personally, I find it interesting that among the Subregions of France, Burgundy is the leader. It abuts the western border of Franche-Comté, part of historic Burgundy, where the family name "Jacotey" is most concentrated in the wolrd, as documented here.

5. Now, how might a careless non-francophone search? Why, by simply using "Alizee", bien sur! Let's see what we get when we try that:

Alizee

In this case, Spanish and Slavic languages are more important than French. Mexico completely dominates the Cities list, and leads the Regions list by a large margin. But other non-trivial regions include Peru, divided Czechoslovakia and Russia. The search history is much less peaked than in the previous study, suggesting that perhaps multiple waves of awareness, with different origin times, lap at the attention of the world. A troubling feature is the fact that the last important surges took place roughly in the half-year following the release of Psychédélices, and there has been downward drift ever since. Note that again there is a news report, and the largest news peak was seen in late 2007, no doubt for the reason discussed above.

6. We can further explore this query, by segregating results by nation, considering Mexico, Peru, Spain, Russia and the USA ("United States").

Alizee (Mexico only)

Alizee (Peru only)

Alizee (Spain only)

Alizee (Russia only)

Alizee (United States only)

The first four studies have something fascinating in common. English is used almost as much as the native language! (Because we omit the diacritical mark, we are not surprised that French is absent from nearly all of them, the antagonistic anomaly being Spain.)

The Russian results are the least interesting. One sees a peak at the time of the Moscow concert, but no activity at any other time. There does not appear to be an abiding fan-base in Russia; just a lot of interest generated around the time of a single event. (So much for singing Kumbaya à la Nena!) Don't cry, Alizée - even Napoleon himself could not conquer Russia.

We all know how important Mexico was in 2008. The pressing question is: how did interest start up and can it be repeated there, and elsewhere? There has been informal discussion at this Web site. Now we get to look at some quantitative evidence, too. Mysteriously (cf. YouTube below?), things ramped up from nothing in the year following the middle of 2005. Just as they were relaxing into a slow decline, a huge peak popped up as 2006 was ending. What caused this? This reinvigorated things and paved the way for the visit in early 2008. But sad to say, after the visit, interest then fizzled out to levels not seen since 2005. If only the mystery of the year-end 2006 spark could be discovered!

Next, we consider Peru. While it is a rather weak compared to Mexico, it has been less capricious than the latter after interest sputtered to life in 2006. But sadly, a slow decline into a humble plateau has taken its toll.

Spain shows a peak at the debut of Psychédélices, but ANOTHER one as well a year earlier, near the end of 2006. It is interesting that the 2006 peak preceded the vital, seminal peak in Mexico. Did one lead to the other? How closely do people in Mexico follow what those in Spain do? Curiously, the leading language for queries from Spain is French. But of almost comparable importance are Spanish, English and Catalan. Despite Hey! Amigo!, Barcelona is the third leading city, not the first.

The results from the United States seem to be a clear reflection of the genesis and ascendancy of YouTube. (Alizée America might consider merging YouTube and Alizée emblems to create one of its own! ;) ) If I might make a personal remark, it was only through YouTube that I learned about Alizée, which brought her my patronage. YouTube offered the public a beta test in May 2005. The first surge followed immediately upon this event. The official YouTube launch in November 2005 was followed by the biggest surge ever. The third big surge, in mid-2006, is less manifestly explained in terms of YouTube, although one notes the full amount of the venture capital from Sequoia Capital was paid out by April 2006. Things plateaued through the end of 2007. Sadly, the advent of Psychédélices marked not the start of a new rise, but of a slow decline into the tepid 2009 plateau.

It is interesting that Spanish and French both overwhelm English queries in the United States! If we can believe the data, it seems English queries for "Alizée" from France are RELATIVELY more important there to the native language, than are native English queries for "Alizee" in the United States! The leading Subregion in the USA is Hawaii - which is not surprising from the perspective of what one might call the Pineapple Princess theory. In second place is Mormon-rich Utah. I guess navel exposure is pretty hot stuff out there, even these days. ;) The problem is, as many total fans as there might be in the United States, it appears they are widely spread out in a vast country. It might be hard to gather them together in one place for a concert, but they might be reached through US media syndication. I think a fee-based YouTube performance would be a great fit , EXCEPT for the fact that time-shifted pirated copies threaten the revenue stream for a performer who is well known.

Slovakia and the Czech Republic provide no plotable data. It seems like Lima beats out Prague, as short a hop from Paris and Ajaccio one finds the Czech capital. Too bad for Alizée that Peru is not as wealthy as nations like Argentina and Chile.

7. Several other nations yield data for the same query, including those you might expect on account of geographical proximity or cultural affinity to France: Italy, Germany, United Kingdom, and Canada. We will be incompletely brief in discussing these.

Alizee (Italy only)

Alizee (Germany only)

Alizee (United Kingdom only)

Alizee (Canada only)

None of these four nations show much, if any, reaction in search volume to the release of Psychédélices. All of them are linguistically curious as well, because of the minority role played by the native language(s). Russian is the leading language in all of them, followed closely by French if it is not native. The protracted interest shown in all these nations, in contrast to the one-shot peak seen in Russia, perhaps suggests that Russians can maintain an interest, but only if they are expatriots.

In Italy, Italian is fourth in importance. Mlle. Juliette notwithstanding, Verona is the third leading city, not the first. More than most nations, the results have what appear to be weird zeroes in it - were there data collection problems?

In Germany, German is fifth in importance, after Russian, French, Spanish and English.

In the United Kingdom, English is in seventh place and almost completely absent! The pecking order partially runs Russian, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Polish; all of them swamp English. Despite Lilly Town, London is only fifth in the Cities list.

In Canada, Chinese is a distant second to Russian, but easily beats both French and English. Yet Francophone Quebec is the leading Subregion, and Quebec cities appear in the top 10. There is something else very strange about Canada, which has large numbers of francophones: if you use the diacritical mark in searching for Alizée, there is not enough data to plot! Is this some sort of vendetta by Mylène's natal compatriots? ;)

8. It in interesting to plot the international results for both "Alizee" and "Alizée" on the SAME scale.

Alizee, Alizée

9. In reviewing these various historical search studies, one should take care. The data does not go back many years, so one should understand what the qualifying word "ever" means. There is the possibility for confusion with other celebrities, now that our Alizée has made her name chic. And remember, these are GOOGLE SEARCH studies, not studies of the Internet, much less the world! In China, another search engine is more important than Google. And there are STILL actually a few people who do not use the Internet, or as intensively, as those of us here do. So, for example, one is not PERFECTLY sure that after Mexico, Peru is the place in Latin America Alizée is most appreciated. What if Argentines or Columbians tend to use search engines other than Google? It would be interesting if Yahoo/Bing published similar studies. (Note: Other threads on this Website which mention "Google Trends" are these.)