One one side of the Final Four bracket, you have Kentucky and the University of Connecticut going at it in a battle of traditional basketball powers. On the other side, however, upstarts reign supreme in the form of Virginia Commonwealth and the Butler Bulldogs. While it’s true this is Butler’s second-straight trip to the Final Four, their appearance in the 2011 Final Four still comes as a surprise. That being said, whatever shock Butler’s inclusion may cause, it’s being overshadowed by completely unexpected VCU Rams.

While the details of VCU’s amazing run to the Final Four will be spared — learn more here if interested — the fact that the Rams are such and unexpected participant has had an impact in regards to Google searches. As is becoming the norm, whenever there’s a sporting event of note, certain Internet services like Google track the interest level of each team the only way they know how: with analytics.

According to Google’s blog, VCU is the most popular team, in terms of search volume. Of course, one of the main motivating factors in these “VCU” searches could very well be ignorance. When you take into account that VCU is not considered one of “big teams” of college basketball, a designation reserved for primarily for the BCS schools, the increased search volume is understandable.

When Google’s image is observed:

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It’s clear that, even though there are upstarts coming to the Final Four party, UConn and UK, popular teams in their own right, also receive a healthy share of Google’s search volume. Oddly enough, however, Kentucky’s search volume actually decreased as their also-unexpected run to the Final Four continued.

Google also posted their findings concerning the Women’s Final Four, and as you would expect, the most popular team in that bunch is Geno Auriemma’s UConn Huskies, and it’s not even close. Of course, this is the same team that broke the record for most wins in a row for college basketball — all of college basketball, including the men’s divisions — so their surrounding popularity is easy to understand.

With Google’s data in mind, who ya got in the Final Four? Will your picks mimic the search volume winner or do you decide using another method?

VCU is the top-searched team in the Final Four with searches for “VCU basketball” up 143% this week, Yahoo says. Kentucky is the second-most-searched team, followed by Butler and then UConn.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest a good portion of the people searching for VCU are people that have no idea who VCU is, and are therefore looking to find out.

The top coach searches are as follows:

1. Shaka Smart, VCU (searches up 2,199% this week)
2. Brad Stevens, Butler (searches up 416% this week)
3. John Calipari, Kentucky (searches up 252% this week)
4. Jim Calhoun, UConn

“VCU coach Shaka Smart has caught the country’s attention,” Yahoo says. “People seem most interested in his bio, wedding and ethnicity with searches for those things spiking off the charts on Yahoo!”

Some other nuggests from the search trends:

-  As Butler appears in the Final Four for its second straight year, there are 119% more searches this week for “Butler basketball” than there were during the same week last year.

- Searches for “unthinkable Final Four” and “lowest seed to make Final Four” are spiking off the charts this week, Yahoo says.

- Fewer people are searching for Final Four tickets. Searches this week for “Final Four tickets” on Yahoo! are 42% lower compared to searches last year,  and 94% lower compared to searches in 2009.

UConn’s Kemba Walker is the most-searched player in the Final Four – 2.4 times higher than searches for Kentucky’s Brandon Knight, 6.4 times higher than searches for Butler’s Matt Howard and 13.6 times higher than searches for VCU’s Jamie Skeen.

Pausing for melodramatic over-the-top effect.

This insanity is digitized these days, perhaps adding some efficiency to an otherwise productivity-draining pastime (but don’t listen to the whip-crackers, their own brackets are filled with ways to reduce the billions of dollars of productivity lost during lunch, weekends, and sleep – if somebody figures out how to transform dreams into spreadsheets, they’ll make billions).

The websites dominating the bracketeering are names you’ll recognize, which means the underdogs you want to win have a long row to hoe to upset the big dogs.

This year’s Web Final Four is already decided, according to Hitwise’s LeeAnn Prescott (I have to say, by the way, I think it’s nifty how LeeAnn’s moniker is webified like that – you almost expect her last name to be Dotcom).

Your NCAA Web Bracket Pool Final Four

·    ESPN.com Men’s Tournament Challenge bracket pool, leading the pack with 32.78 percent of the fan base spending just over 17 minutes of their workday in hoopdream hysteria.

·    CBS Sportsline.com’s Fantasy Mayhem is on ESPN’s high-topped heels, attracting 32.18 percent of the market for fifteen and half minutes.

·    Yahoo! Sports’ "Tournament Pick’em" gets 30.29 percent of NCAA fans, and the award for the dumbest tournament pool title. Yahoo! Sports fanatics spend about 13 minutes there.

·    Fox’s Fantasy College Bracket Challenge squeaks into the top four with 4.75 percent and an eight-minute average session time.

But the smart office punters are dribbling some mathematical precision to step up their game. A few minutes at Poologic.com, and they can one-up the water-cooler competition with algorithmic surety. Tom Adams estimates his underdog algorithm has secured $250,000 for his site users.

Don’t bring that scientific evolutionary game to USA Today’s Robert Lipsyte’s court, however. Lipsyte takes the over-dramatization, the madness, the convulsive, paroxysmal ecstasy to a whole new level of religiosity (boy that was a whole lotta big words in a row, wasn’t it?).

Just so it’s not overdone (too late, huh?), I’ll leave you with Lipsyte’s Final Four existentialism:

March Madness becomes a way to chart our existence in a manner that seems to give shape to destiny. The clear lines of the bracket override our feelings of personal and political helplessness, the sense that all is out of control.

Sorry for setting off your BS detectors. Just hit reset.