NYTimes: Inequality and Web Search Trends

The Upshot in the New York Times has a nice article titled In One America, Guns and Diet. In the Otehr, Cameras and ‘Zoolander.’: Inequality and Web Search Trends by David Leonhardt (August 18, 2014). They combined data from Google on favorite searches by county with socio economic data to show what searches correlate with the richer and poorer areas. While few of the correlations are surprising they provide details that one wouldn’t think of. Not only are religious searches more common in poorer areas, but so are searches for “about hell” and “antichrist.” In wealthy areas by contrast they search for “holiday greetings” presumably because they are more likely to live far from family.

Ayway, a neat study that illustrates who the aggregation of different datasets can work.