Friday's sad update about the John Kennedy, Jr. plane crash got us wondering about ongoing public awareness of the Kennedy family.
Are they still popular? And in what way?
We scanned last week's top 50,000 queries for the word Kennedy -- the results are below. As always, we can't give out actual numbers so we'll deal in percentages; each number stands for the total of all Kennedy searches received by that term. The list:
29.4% John F. Kennedy
16.7% JFK
10.0% JFK assassination
8.9% Kennedy
5.9% Jackie Kennedy
5.4% JFK Airport
4.7% John Kennedy
4.5% Kennedy Center
3.6% Carolyn Bessette Kennedy
3.5% Dead Kennedys
3.4% Kennedy Space Center
2.2% Ted Kennedy
1.8% Robert Kennedy
Add up the totals for John F. Kennedy, John Kennedy, and JFK and you get about 51% of all Kennedy queries. One odd point: the word "junior" or "jr" didn't show up in any of the Kennedy queries in the top 50,000. Either JFK Jr. is so well-known that people drop the "Jr." -- or he's so forgotten that nobody searches for him.
Queries for just Kennedy a tad mysterious -- they could be for the family, the president, or the MTV veejay. We just don't know.
Speaking of MTV, The Dead Kennedys were a hot punk band of the late 1970s. The name, pointedly outrageous at the time, paved the way for the carefully outrageous and plain nutty band names of today.
Jackie Kennedy still shows strength, beating everyone in the family but the president (and perhaps her son). Interestingly, all of her queries used the name Kennedy, not Onassis. Requests for Jacqueline beat requests for Jackie by a slim 52% to 48% margin.
Add all the terms together and the Kennedys got about as many queries last week as Barbie or Canada. That puts them well above Garth Brooks, but well below baby names.
