People [Swedish] like to collect instances of google journalism — where journalists google a term and cite the number of hits they get back in support of whatever point it is they are trying to make.

Today I heard what may have been the first case (can it be? Surely not) of Google politicking: Leif Pagrotsky, Sweden’s minister for education, research and culture, was speaking at a conference on public diplomacy, nation branding, and Sweden’s image [Swedish] when he made the point that Swedish culture is far more important to its image abroad than Swedish politics.

He went on to illustrate this by mentioning how when he googled The Hives, he got far more results back (1,890,000) than when he googled Göran Persson (836,000). Case closed.

Or is it? First off, results vary depending on whether you encapsulate your search in quotes or not. Surrounded by accuracy-inducing quotation marks, “The Hives”‘s (625,000) victory over “Göran Persson” (540,000) is much less pronounced. But then you have to consider the fact that in English, hives moonlights as a skin condition, hogging the Google hits. So, as long as Göran Persson does not become a synonym for a wasting disease or somesuch, he will always labor at a disadvantage against hives in the google popularity stakes.