‘Why Is Boston So Racist’ and 50 Other City Stereotypes Revealed by Google Autocomplete is an article Emily Badger co-wrote with Mark Byrnes back in July 2013. In it, they talk about Nate Shivar who made it a project to plug the 50 most populous cities into the Google search bar (Why is ‘X’ so…) and report the autocompleted results. They were pretty outstanding seeing as how Google autocompletes by the most frequently searched terms. Not much has changed in a year’s time either because I spent a fair amount of time playing around with Google autocomplete after reading this article. Pretty obvious that my favorite stereotype mentioned in this article is this one:
Explore all the city’s autocompletes here: http://www.nateshivar.com/1451/how-other-people-stereotype-your-city/
Although smaller cities often have little to no autocomplete results I’ve assembled a small list of some more local results below:
Kent Wyatt, any thoughts? People are obviously concerned.
Perhaps the coolest, most satisfying autocomplete experiment was when I did a search for “why is local government…” Here is the result, and notice the lack of negativity:
Have any ideas for future Emily Badger articles? Find me on Twitter: @joshg22