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Google autocomplete reveals fattest, most racist and most boring U.S. states

Mike Gallagher

Aug 16, 2012 - 02:54

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Google autocomplete reveals fattest, most racist and most boring U.S. states

Boring: For 18 U.S. states (shaded purple) autocomplete included 'boring' among the top searched words

Think 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.

The result showed what people ask most about a state. In Indiana's case they want to know why it's so 'boring', and the same with Maine.

Georgia is 'hot', 'racist', and also 'boring'. Oregon is 'liberal', 'weird', 'rainy', and again, 'boring'. Ohio is also 'boring', but 'important in the primaries'.

Why is ... so obese? States with 'obese' among popular searched terms include Texas, Tennessee and West Virginia, where obesity is most prevalent

When DiResta used the formula of 'Why is Arizona so ...?' the terms that popped up included 'hot', 'racist', 'conservative' and 'crazy'.

West Virginia also didn't come out well, the top suggested search terms included 'poor', 'racist', 'fat' and 'weird'.

According to recently released Gallup research, West Virgina was ranked the least livable state based on low unemployment, appalling obesity rates and lack of economic growth.

For 18 states, the common search term associated with them was 'boring'. Among those considered snoozeworthy included Idaho, Montana.

But Google wasn't all negative.

When the state of Colorado was searched, autocomplete terms that appeared were: 'cold', 'healthy', 'skinny' and 'awesome'.

Venture capitalist DiResta, a recent New York transplant to San Francisco, said in her blog about the experiment: 'I started wondering, how do Americans really think about "those people" in other states? What are the most common stereotypes?'

'The qualitative searches were most interesting to me. There are 12 unique terms that are classifiable as "culture/sentiment" queries, of which ten are negative: backwards, bad, boring, crazy, dangerous, hated, racist, stupid, trashy, weird.

'There were a few redeeming positive results; Colorado, Minnesota, Texas, and Vermont are "awesome," and Montana, New Hampshire, and New York are "great".

'But for the most part, it doesn’t seem like we think very nice things about each other… at the very least, we’re more inclined to search for articles supporting (or related to) negative biases.

'The single most common result of all was "boring," which appeared for 18 states with no particular regional concentration. Other popular terms (retued for >10 states) were "humid", "windy", "expensive", and "liberal".

'Strangely, Connecticut and Pennsylvania both retued "haunted"; apparently there are a lot of ghost sightings (and related walking tours).

'My favorite result of all was "enchanting": New Mexico is beautiful.'