A curious problem with the “the” search feature in Baseball Reference

I’m wondering if there is something going on with Baseball-Reference’s “the” feature.  Or more precisely, maybe it’s just being gamed. 

For those not familiar with this fun feature, it works like this:  In the search bar, you can type in “the” proceeded by a portion of a player’s name.  Baseball Reference will then return the the most popularly searched player with that name.

For example, if you search for “the mathewson”, you will get Christy Mathewson’s player page.  Also if you enter “the robinson”, it will currently return Robinson Cano’s player page (honestly, I was hoping for Frank or Brooks but I understand).  So you get the idea.  It works with first or last name… even nicknames. Try “the Peach”.  It’s a handy feature and I use it occasionally.

But here’s the rub:  my friend Brando emailed me to tell me that for kicks, he tried searching for “the johnson” thinking he might see Walter or maybe Randy.  Who came up in his search?  Tom Johnson, a pitcher who saw plenty of time in the minors but never made the bigs here the U.S.  He did play one year in Japan, though. 

I thought I might test it.  I tried another big name.  I typed in “the young” thinking Cy Young would be the top search.  Nope.  It was Ray Young, another long time minor league pitcher who, you guessed, played in Japan. 

As I mentioned, I believe these searches are user-driven, that is, they are determined by the popularity (or number of web hits) of the player’s page.  I wouldn’t have any problem with this model if these two players were legitimate stars in Japan but both Tom Johnson and Ray Young pitched a total of three years between the two of them. 

All in all, it’s not a big deal but I wonder what’s behind it.