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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

Expected Lansing would be Magic Johnson but instead its Larry Page. Magic comes back often and is active in local charities, even leading efforts to raise money for college scholarships.

On the other hand Larry Page has to my knowledge never returned or given a dime to local charities. So perhaps that makes people ever more curious about him.

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It's not "The person people from Lansing searched the most." It's "the person from Lansing that people search the most". Worldwide, Larry Page is certainly more of a public figure than Magic Johnson.

"Worldwide, Larry Page is certainly more of a public figure than Magic Johnson."

This is HN bubble thinking.

Very few regular people know who 'Larry Page' is.

Almost everyone knows who 'Magic Johnson' is.

Have a look at Google search trends.

Not really. This is people looking at Wikipedia.

Guess: Who's the Alan with the most pageviews in Wikipedia? Who's the Steve?

I left the answers here:

- https://medium.com/towards-data-science/bigquery-without-a-c...

Basically a show-off for BigQuery, but to answer this specific question: The most viewed Alan and Steve in Wikipedia are the ones closer to HN.

    SELECT title, SUM(views) views
    FROM `fh-bigquery.wikipedia_v3.pageviews_2019`
    WHERE DATE(datehour) BETWEEN '2019-01-01' AND '2019-01-10'
    AND wiki='en'
    AND title LIKE r'Alan\_%'
    GROUP BY title
    ORDER BY views DESC
    LIMIT 10

"Worldwide, Larry Page is certainly more of a public figure than Magic Johnson."

Is what I responded to.

Don't misconstrue how much people do not care about business people, and how much they do care about sports figures.

Nobody in my family knows who Larry Page is.

Ok, I see.

Just for fun:

- In Silicon Valley... Magic Johnson has more google searches than Larry Page.

- In India... Larry Page has more google searches than Magic Johnson.

- https://imgur.com/a/KwQ5wJt

Just checking Google Trends, as you suggested...

Larry > Magic might be the HN bubble, but Magic > Larry definitely is the US bubble.

Most of the world does not care about basketball at all.

Except China. I’m always asked about the NBA when I visit China, and I know nothing about basketball.

In the US, the number one Larry that is a rival to Magic is not even Larry Page.

Hilarious: in the US, Larry Bird a guy who has not played ball in almost 30 years (!) is still way more popular than Larry Page. At least according to G trends.

The the OPs point however, Wikipedia is a special place.

How many people ever paid money to go watch Larry Page at work for a day? Corporate executives have wealth and power; let the ballplayers have the celebrity :)

> The most viewed Alan and Steve in Wikipedia are the Silicon Valley ones.

You had me well baffled with this - who is the "Silicon Valley Alan"? The only candidate I could think of was Alan Kay who, with all respect, was never likely to be the most-viewed of all Alans.

(Turns out to mean Alan Turing - I don't think he had any connection with Silicon Valley)

Oops, edited for clarity/intentions to "closer to HN".

Except that it's really "person whose Wikipedia page references Lansing searched the most," which is how you end up with Phil Knight (an Oregon native who started a company famously headquartered in Oregon, and continues to donate huge amounts of money to an Oregon university) for La Quinta, CA, a suburb of Palm Springs in which he happens to have a house.

Actually, no Larry Page isn't according to their stats [1].

So either it's a stats bug, or Magic Johnson is missing a link at all to Lansing in their data.

[1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.or...

They are using category pages like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_East_Lans... to determine the links. Larry Page is in there, while Magic Johnson is in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_from_Dana_Poin...

As a resident of East Lansing I’ve often wondered what was the deal with Larry Page never having anything to do with the town. I figured it’s a tradition if you “make it big” to throw money around in your hometown even if it’s purely for egocentric reasons. Is there bad blood somehow?

East Lansing is best known as the home of Michigan State University which is best known as the school that harbored Larry Nassar while he molested hundreds of american gymnasts.

Who wants to be associated with that?

Larry Nassar is decidedly bad. But you've lost all sense of perspective if you think he defines the place. Or you're a hyper-partisan Wolverine fan;<).

I'll just name one thing that came out of MSU and that the cancer drug Cisplatin. It's saved millions of lives and is known as the gold standard of cancer drugs. I could easily name hundreds more with more impact than Larry Nassar.

https://msutoday.msu.edu/feature/2018/discovering-the-gold-s...

I didn't cherry pick Larry Nassar to make MSU look bad, it was just the first news story from Google when I googled Michigan State University.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/05/29/fears-about-a...

It wouldn't take too many more revelations for deviant sexual exploitation to be the first thing non-sports people think of when they hear the phrase "Big 10". Penn State, Michigan State, Ohio State...

Ok but Larry Page has been ignoring East Lansing since well before the Larry Nassar shit came to light so this is not relevant to the discussion. Tarring an entire city because of a few assholes also doesn’t seem very sporting.

I don't blame the townies. The results seem to be the same whether it's East Lansing MI or State College PA. There is a culture in the Big 10, of tolerating exploitation in service of dubious collegiate athletic achievement. Does the school administration spend a fraction of the time thinking about lifesaving drugs that they spend thinking about football? If legislatures had any regard for their states, they would shut down such rotten institutions.

Well, he did go to the University of Michigan...

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