Bidding for Attention: using google trends to measure global interest in Olympic bidders

It is clear that hosting an Olympic Games can bring global interest to a city, but the extent to which an Olympic bid can be used for similar means is less apparent. Using Google Trends data, this research investigates the stages of an Olympic bid process that brings most attention to a bid city and where this interest comes from. This was achieved by investigating the number of searches for each bid city during the bid process. This research has found that those cities who do not reach the host city election receive comparatively fewer Google searches than those who have a realistic chance of hosting. The extent to which this can be considered global attention is questionable as the majority of searches originate in the nations of those cities involved in the bid.