How much popular is table tennis? Googling for table tennis (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Table tennis is a popular sport, practiced worldwide. In particular, it is the most popular racquet sport in the world and ranks second in terms of participation. Over 10-18 million players compete in many tournaments each year. OBJECTIVE However, little is known about the table tennis related web activities. METHODS Google Trends (GT), a freely online available tool that tracks and monitor web searches, was mined from 2004 to today worldwide, using table tennis as a keyword. The searches volumes were correlated with country ranking (overall and broken down for gender). An autoregressive moving-average (ARMA) model was used to model the GT-generated data. RESULTS Table tennis resulted the second most popular racquet sport being googled worldwide. Interest for table tennis has slightly decreased over the time with table tennis-related web activities exhibiting a cyclic pattern. The best ARMA model which fits the trend of Internet searches is an ARMA(6,5). The most related searches concerned equipment and sports products for playing table tennis, famous athletes, other team sports and scheduled tournaments. Country ranking (both overall and broken down for gender) well correlated with GT-based RSV. CONCLUSIONS Despite its limitations, GT appears to have some degrees of utility in tracking, monitoring in real time and forecasting/nowcasting table tennis related web searches.