THE EXPERIMENT
What do you think of when you hear the words Doctor Who? More to the point, what does Google Image Search think of when it hears the words Doctor Who? As an experiment, I wanted to find the most popular subject matter when I made an image search under those words. For the purposes of this experiment, I typed in simply ‘Doctor Who’ and examined the first 100 images that came up. I was expecting certain things, but the results were rather surprising.

THE RULES
The Doctor trumps everything else, so if there is a Doctor shown, they get the point over anything else in the image. In the case of multiple Doctors, each one gets a point. Companions trump monsters, so if there’s an image of, for example, Rose and a Dalek, Rose gets the point over the Dalek (as long as the Doctor isn’t in the picture). Multiple companions get one point each. Icons, props and products only get a point if no Doctor or Companion is shown.

THE RESULTS
1. The Thirteenth Doctor (23 points)
2. The Tenth Doctor (21 points)
3. The Eleventh Doctor (18 points)
4. The Fourteenth Doctor (13 points)
=5. The Seventh Doctor – Sylvester McCoy (12 points)
=5. The Eighth Doctor – Paul McGann (12 points)
=6. The First Doctor – William Hartnell (11 points)
=6. The Second Doctor – Patrick Troughton (11 points)
=6. The Fifth Doctor – Peter Davison (11 points)
=6. The Sixth Doctor – Colin Baker (11 points)
=6. The Ninth Doctor – Christopher Eccleston (11 points)
=6. The Twelfth Doctor – Peter Capaldi (11 points)
=7. The Third Doctor – Jon Pertwee (10 points)
=7. The Fourth Doctor – Tom Baker (10 points)
8. The Fifteenth Doctor – Ncuti Gatwa (5 points)
9. Doctor Who Logo (4 points)
10. The Master (3 points)
=11. Amy Pond – Karen Gillan (2 points)
=11. Character Options Toys (2 points)
=11. Dalek (2 points)
=11. Lonely Assassins (Game, 2 points)
=11. The TARDIS (2 points)
=11. Time Fracture (Escape Room, 2 points)
=12. Clara Oswald – Jenna Coleman (1 point)
=12. The Edge of Time (Game, 1 point)
=12. Fall Guys (Game, 1 point)
=12. Jo Grant – Katy Manning (1 point)
=12. Kris Marshall (1 point)
=12. Rose Tyler – Billie Piper (1 point)

ANALYSIS
There are certain things here that I really wasn’t expecting. For starters, I was expecting the Fourth and Twelfth Doctors to rank much higher. It’s only to be expected that the most recent Doctor to have had full episodes shown, the Thirteenth Doctor, would ran highly and I fully anticipated that the Tenth Doctor would be up there, but bear in mind that if I’d counted the actor David Tennant instead of the characters the Tenth and Fourteenth Doctors, he’d have wiped everyone else off the page with a staggering 34 points! Ncuti Gatwa also ranked surprisingly low, because although he’s yet to debut, I thought people would be Googling his new costume and so on. This experiment was conducted on Saturday 25th February 2023, but I daresay if you conducted it any other day, the results might be completely different… so ultimately the entire test is meaningless.

Sighs.