About six months ago I spent some time playing with a site that shows how popular a Google search query is in each U.S. state. I recently decided to see what’s been going on more recently so checked into the main source for this info to get an idea of what’s been going on so far this year. Once again, the results are both fascinating and disturbing.
With the disclaimer that the results are from the day I checked these out and they may have changed since, here’s a few examples in a couple broad categories:
Political
- With “socialism” being a new buzz word, residents of Wyoming seem most interested, ranking at the top of the list. They are followed by Utah, Kansas and Nebraska. North Dakotans, however, don’t seem to give a rip, ranking last with a 0.0 search volume. South Dakota, by the way, was just out of the top 10 with a search volume of 80.
- Oddly, only Texas (100), New York (92) and California (58) show up for “credit card reform.” Every other state scored a 0.
- Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, but “bailout” and “bank bailout” are most popular in D.C.
The Interweb Thingy
- The District of Columbia ranks first for “bloggers” with Utah, which ranks first for “blogs.”
- New York and California rank first and second for “twitter” while Louisiana is first for “what is twitter.” The Dakotas and Wyoming are either well in the know or totally oblivious, each with a 0 score for the latter. (Interestingly, if you add a question mark to the end of “what is twitter,” Colorado is first and Louisiana has a score of 0.)
- Hawaii is apparently Apple mad, ranking first for “mac,” “macbook,” “macbook pro,” and “itouch” and second for “ipod.”
South Dakota ranks
- We remain first for “ethanol” with Iowa second (84).
- We are in first for “wii” and third for “wii fit.”
- We are second for “peace,” behind Vermont.
- Although South Dakota ranked 10th for “book reviews,” it is evidently very interested in vampires. We ranked third for “twilight books,” fourth for “twilight book,” and ninth for “twilight series.”
Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll
- Unfortunately, South Dakota seems to rank a bit too high in the sex category:
- We are second for “incest,” behind Alaska and tied with Kansas, and just out of the top 10 for “porn,” where Texas and Florida share number one “honors.”
- Perhaps even more disturbing, we are third for “beastiality,” behind Alaska and Wyoming.
- We are third for “sexual intercourse,” sixth for “sex videos” and 10th for “anal sex” (where we are just four points out of third).
- We are tied for first for “tits,” undoubtedly because of the number of dairy cattle we have, and first for “boobs,” perhaps referring to the intellectual level of the people who gave us the high ranking for some of the other search terms.
- Do you think there’s any connection between the number of retirees and the fact Arizona and Florida rank 1st and 2nd for “viagra“? Florida also ranks first for “cialis,” for which the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming had a 0.
- North Dakota, surprisingly, is second for “LSD,” although it is quite a ways behind Vermont.
- South Dakota is ninth for “meth,” a category headed by Montana and Idaho.
- As it should be, New Jersey is first for “springsteen” and “bruce springsteen” and is second for “bruce.”
- Vermont, meanwhile, is first for “bob dylan” and “rolling stones,” while Nebraska, of all places, is first by a wide margin for “jackson browne.”
Given the time spent looking up the foregoing, perhaps it is appropriate to close by noting that only Texas (100), New York (87) and California (79) scored for “anal retentive.”
The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom.
Jon Stewart, Wired, September 2005“
