Sociology: Popularity of a Person or a Country

Which is more popular? A country or a person? Consider the country called Sierra Leone located in west Africa.Sierra Leone is known for its diamonds, the devastating civil war which lasted for 11 years, and its role in the slave trade centuries past. Most people have heard about the country but do they know anything more than that?

Now compare with a person's name. Obviously, there's very few people with the full name Sierra Leone*. However, there are people with the last name of Leone. There's two methods here to see who's or what is more popular and both uses Google. The first is a simple Google Image search for 'Leone' which can be seen as follows:

From the first screen, the statistics for each image linked to the country or a person as are as follows for the first 23 images shown:

Sierra Leone: 7
Sunny Leone: 5
Ashley Leone: 1
Pino Leone: 1
Matthew Leone: 3
Rudy Leone: 1
Jim Leone: 1
Jennifer Leone: 1
Donna Leone: 1
Paola Leone: 1
Carlo Leone: 1

Clearly, Sierra Leone does lead but not by much. Combined, from the image relation percentage, the popularity of people with the last name Leone is much greater than that of the country of Sierra Leone. Taking a look with method two of examining number of Google searches for each of the 10 people and the country Sierra Leone reveals the following number of results in order:

1. Sierra Leone: 380,000,000
2. Sunny Leone: 57,400,000
3. Jennifer Leone: 16,500,000
4. Jim Leone: 15,000,000
5. Mathew Leone: 12,200,000
6. Donna Leone: 12,100,000
7. Ashley Leone: 11,000,000
8. Carlo Leone: 9,400,000
9. Paola Leone: 4,740,000
10. Pino Leone: 3,820,000
11. Rudy Leone: 2,800,000

Combined, the 10 people searches amount to 144,960,000 or over 1/3 of the amount of information for Sierra Leone. Clearly, the information for Sierra Leone still dominates but there is much interest in the people as well. As a sidenote, an interesting lineup of the popularity level of these people and what they do highlights what much of society has their minds wrapped around. In the order of the number of results by Google and removing the names Jennifer Leone and Jim Leone which are due to people with a really popular first name, people's minds are focused on:

1. Hot girls (Sunny Leone or Pino Leone)
2. Music (Matthew Leone or Ashley Leone)
3. Crime novels or fictional Venice (Donna Leone)
4. Science or justs Canavian disease (Paola Leone)
5. Politics (Carlo Leone)
6. Horses (Rudy Leone)

This is not very surprising at all given that to most people, politics and equestrian (art of horse riding) are hardly interesting, while almost no one will object to music and no guys will object to hot girls. Still,  the good sign remains that the country information still ranks first. Perhaps this shows that global politics is still interesting to many people but politicians are not since they come and go. *By the way, did you know that there's a town in Sierra Leone named Shen Ge? I plan to go there one day.