- Research shows people ask search engine why Georgia is so ‘racist’
- For 18 states, the common search term associated with them was ‘boring’
hink you know what everyone else says about your state? Maybe you should ask Google.
One enterprising blogger has and got some surprising and – some might say – less surprising results.
As part of her research into stereotypes, Renee DiResta hit on a clever idea to find out what people think about different U.S. states.
She began typing the names into Google and used the search engine’s autocomplete function to complete the query.
So, for example, she asked ‘why is Georgia so’ and Google’s algorithm, which tries to predict the next word based on popular searches, did the rest.
WHAT IS GOOGLE AUTOCOMPLETE?
When a user types a word into the Google search box, the autocomplete algorithm offers search terms based on what is entered.
For example, if someone starts to type ‘new york’, autocomplete will offer searches for ‘New York City,’ ‘New York Times,’ and ‘New York University’ based on the first word.
Queries are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely algorithmic factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention.
Source: Support.google.com
