whos the most famous chess player

But Bobby Fischer was around before the internet was huge, right? So the google search is a faulty way of finding out.

i wonder how i got different numbers.  although i only did names not quotation marks...

i just did 2 more searches each and got different numbers each time.  oh well. stupid google.

Indeed I am quite sure that Bobby Fischer was more famous than Garry Kasparov in 1972 for example

The question posed is who is not who was.  A google search is contextually appropriate.

NN I see him all the time in books

 You Searched Kasparov not "Garry" Kasparov

 Before my chess days i knew who Kasparov was but i never knew who was Fischer

ACtually if you search bobby fischer in google you won't get much results, but if you search robert fischer or robert james fischer you get much more results then garry kasparov

It depends on your demographics. Who are you asking?

Americans? It's Fischer. Russians? Probably Kasparov. Baby Boomers? Fischer. Teenagers? Kasparov.

I would guess they're way ahead of everyone else.

So was Julius Caesar, but you still get 5,340,000 hits for him...

Well in my case no, I still get much more results for "garry kasparov" than "robert james fischer" or "robert fischer". The quotation marks are necessary, otherwise pages containing both the words 'robert' and 'fischer' are counted even if they may not have anything to do with the chess player.

Still, this google count is a very unreliable measure. For example if I change the language of the interface (NOT the language of the returned results), the number changes dramatically for the same search.

I'd never heard of Fischer before I started playing chess this year. 

Kasparov for me

(I'm Generation X)

Google trends Fischer versus Kasparov

That means: Fischer to USA and Iceland, Kasparov to the rest of the world (as I thought)

About the simple "google hits": that can vary from the region/state in which you are. Here I have: "bobby fischer" -> 1.440.000;"kasparov" ->1.660.000 (searching only "fischer" gives unrelated results) (both searches without quotation marks) (The fact is that Kasparov is presented as Garry, Garri, Garri Kimovič, Garry Kimovich, "Gari", and I'm not considering Га́рри Ки́мович Каспа́ров)

members of the wu-tang and other hip-hop rap artists play chess as well.  i would think they are more well known than fischer or kasparov. but if we are talking strictly of professional chess players then i personally believe that more random people across the world would recognize fischers name more than kasparovs.

eventhough fischer more famous, kasparov will win in the next 10 years or more... he is still here.

I don't think so jpd303; random not US people would more likely have heard of Garry than of Bobby. Maybe you say that 'cause you're american, and you have lived the "bobby phenomenon" and it seems maybe impossible to you that someone could have not ever heard of Bobby. But out of US borders, considering non-chess players too, only Kasparov is the name that you can bet everybody knows, believe me.

your probably right on garry over bobby, but how about the wu-tang clan over garry?...

Well, here, wu-tang clan was known only between 1996-1999 (are they still alive?), so you have to catch someone aged 26/30 who was fond of rap in the '90s :I