The United States Is… (How Autocomplete Describes the 50 States), by Matt Shirley

04 Feb 2013

The following map is based on search engine autocomplete results. Autocomplete is the stuff that pops up when you search for stuff in Google or Yahoo! or AskJeeves (probably?).

For this project, I used Yahoo!’s autocomplete (Yahoo! produced more results than Google so suck it) to find out how search engine users are describing each of the 50 states. This is what Iowa’s search looked like:

I wanted the terms to describe the states, so I weeded out unhelpful results like:

• Questions (Iowa is in what time zone?)
• State abbreviations (Iowa is IA)
• Leading queries (Iowa is known for…)

 
From there, I’d take the topmost term that satisfied my conditions and put it on the map. Behold my results:

Note: Search results vary based on who is searching for them so your results might look different than mine.

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