the buzz log

For those without ties to the Commonwealth, cricket is a decidedly confusing sport. The Buzz happens to belong to the befuddled sector of the population (looks a lot like baseball to us!). One thing we do understand is Search, however, and we can tell you quite confidently that cricket is immensely popular with searchers and has the Buzz scores to prove it.

The current run of cricket matches, which began in July with England and Australia's biennial Ashes matchup, has Search bowling over with people looking for scores and live updates. Over the past month, we've seen steady increases in searches on "live cricket" (+529%), "cricket scores" (+417%), and "cricket india" (+446%), to name a few. "Cricket" is ranked in our top 300 searches overall, and "live cricket" falls within the top 5,000.

Cricket fans appear to be overwhelmingly male -- men accounted for 87% of "live cricket" searches. Though the U.S. does not have nearly the number of fans as the U.K. or India, it does have its share of cricket followers. A high number of searches come from the San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C., metropolitan areas.

And so the world awaits the results of its favorite cricket matches. In the meantime, we'll be studying up on the laws of cricket to see if we can't do more than sit on the Search sidelines.