Google Trends

 

It's hard to know what is the "biggest" martial art out there.

Does this refer to how many people train in it, or have trained in it at some point in their lives?

Is it how interesting it is to the population in general?

I don't know. How do you measure such a thing?

Taekwondo is a big martial art, perhaps the biggest, and its participants are registered into worldwide organizations.  Based on this, they claim 30,000,000 current participants. However, even in this highly-organized Olympic sport, this is somewhat misleading.

In most countries, there is nothing mandatory about Taekwondo practitioners having membership in any governing body unless their school wants to be involved in authorized, recognized competition.

So how accurate is the 30,000,000 estimate? Your guess is as good as mine, and keep in mind that this is the most organized martial art that there is. The others don't even try and venture a guess.

Therefore, I decided to cheat. Google allows regular folks to access some of their data. You can give them up to five words or phrases, and they will tell you how they compare in the number of people who have searched for Google for them in the last year.

For example, I am going to enter Baseball, Basketball, Football, Hockey, and UFC. How many times have those terms been searched for on Google in the last 12 months? What are your guesses for how they compared in the number of times they were Googled? The score was;

Football 31

Basketball 15

Baseball 6

UFC                4

Hockey 3

How did you do in your prediction?

Now let's see what Google has to say about martial arts. This time I put in Jiu Jitsu (in this article I am using this slightly incorrect spelling. Doing it this way is more effective when using Google Trends, as opposed to the correct version Jiu-Jitsu.), Karate, Kung Fu, Taekwondo, and UFC, and got;

UFC 30

Karate 5

Kung Fu 3

Jiu-Jitsu 2

Taekwondo 1

This is interesting but weird. UFC isn't a martial art at all. It is a sporting event, company, promoter, and brand. If you think I should have entered MMA instead, you might be surprised. If I put in UFC and MMA the result is;

UFC 30

MMA 7

It would seem that the public considers UFC to be the relevant term for that type of sport.

All the real martial arts on my list tend to have sporting aspects, but typically these are painfully boring for the general public to watch. They are NOT spectator friendly.

So how about removing UFC from my list of martial arts, and putting in something that is often touted as the most practiced martial art on earth; Tai Chi? Many are involved in this slow-motion activity, but most are quite willing to admit that it has nothing to do with fighting whatsoever.

Karate 59

Kung Fu 41

Jiu-Jitsu 21

Taekwondo 14

Tai Chi 11

Let's drop Tai Chi. It just isn't getting searched to the same extent as the other items listed.

This is fun data, but very limited. It doesn't address what people thinking when the entered the terms into a Google search.

When searching for Karate,  did they mean the Japanese martial art, or simply any kind of punching and kicking activity?

Probably, when they entered Kung Fu they were thinking of some type of Chinese martial art, or maybe they were trying to look up the old David Carradine TV show, or perhaps the genre of cinema that includes Bruce Lee movies.

Taekwondo is pretty specific, but perhaps they were looking for information about it and had mistakenly searched Karate instead, and so it didn't show up in the Taekwondo results at all.

Jiu Jitsu is Bazilian, also has a Japanese cousin. There may have been some confusion, but the Japanese variant is usually spelled Jujutsu.

So what can we tell from the results? Consider the currently prevailing opinion in the martial arts community that the hot item is Jiu Jitsu. Really.

Let's compare Jiu Jitsu's Google search score of 21, against that of the striking arts Taekwondo, Karate, and Kung Fu. The total for striking adds up to 114, which shows more than FOUR times the interest of Jiu Jitsu.

This seems counter-intuitive. It has been proven many times that grappling works better than striking in terms of true self-defense skills, and this result clearly shows that the public in general doesn't care.

I then checked Google for the results of other grappling methods. I wanted to include wrestling, but it means just too many things. There is no way to single out "real" wrestling (freestyle, Olympic, Greco-Roman, etc) from "Professional Wrestling?"

Instead, I ran Jiu Jitsu against Jujutsu, Judo, Catch Wrestling, and Sambo.

Jiu Jitsu     72

Judo     25

Sambo     10

Jujutsu             5

Catch Wrestling  1

Jiu Jitsu alone scored almost three times as high as did the term in the number two spot; Judo.

So conclusions have to be that Striking outscores Grappling in the public consciousness, but that within the category of grappling, Jiu Jitsu dominates.