On the assumption that gold medals in poster competitions will go to the best designers, the next question to ask is: Who are they and how can we find out? The well known search machine Google is such a magic mirror, and I have done some research in what it could tell us about posters and poster designers.

The origin of this method, called citation analysis, goes back to the 1970's and it has been used successfully in the natural sciences to predict Nobel Prize winners, and to distribute Soros grant money. It's basic idea is to look at the scientific literature and see how often somebody is quoted in the articles of his peers. This was found to be more reliable than just counting the number of somebody's publications.

The method was of course controversial, there were endless discussions whether "popular" also means "best" and so on, and it also required enormous library and computing resources.

One day, it occurred to me that the Internet search machine Google is reported to pay particular attention to web sites to which links from other sites are pointing, and so we have in fact the whole "quotation counting machinery" already implemented and available at our fingertips, free and instant.

There are so many Imbodens and Troxlers living in Switzerland, that I had to include their given name, in between quotes (for a discussion of Google syntax see their advanced search tips). There were still politicians and tennis players among the results, which I filtered out using poster as an additional search term, so that the final search expression for our example then looks like that:

Here is the result, sorted for the number of web sites found:

Niklaus Troxler	200
Werner Jeker	47
Melchior Imboden	40

Of course, it is entirely possible that somebody with even more Google points than Troxler can be found. Google can not by itself suggest those with most points, but if I propose some names, it can tell me whom it considers most popular among them.

As the ranking of the list agreed more or less with my perception of the international standing of these artists, I felt sufficiently encouraged to try to rank more, using the same simple principle.