Lesson 10

Author: KatarzynaLis
Contact me at: angielski.zajeciadodatkowe@gmail.com

Google search

What do you think?

a. Jot down 3-5 things you googled this week. What does it say about you?
b. Do your Google searches reveal the real you?
c. Can your searches be used to predict future?

Listen. Take notes.

surveys vs. Google

racism vs. searches

Barack Obama, a Democrat

Trump, a racist

predicting elections

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Lesson 10
Author: KatarzynaLis
Contact me at: angielski.zajeciadodatkowe@gmail.com

Do your Google searches reveal the real you?

SETH STEPHENS-DAVIDOWITZ: So, the past 80 years if you want to know what people
want, why they do the things they do, what they’re going to do, you ask them in a survey. But
people may lie to surveys. But it’s been shown that people are really, really honest on certain
internet sources, particularly their Google searches, so they tell Google things they might not tell
to anybody else. They might not tell family members, friends, surveys, even themselves sometimes.
And by mining this data we can get better insights1 into who we are.
All the data I analyze is anonymous2 and aggregate3, but you can see patterns in this. So,
for example, before an election if you ask people in a survey, “Are you going to vote,” pretty
much everybody says yes, or a huge percentage of people say yes, even if they have absolutely
no intention to vote just because it makes them feel good to tell a survey that they’re voting.
But you can actually see—based on where searches for how to vote or where to vote are
highest—how high turnout really will be in different parts of the country. And that’s a very
accurate predictor4 of who is actually going to vote.
When I started this research I measured how frequently people made racist searches in the
United States. And the searches I looked at were very, very strikingly5 racist6 searches looking for
basically jokes mocking7 African Americans. And I was struck by how frequently people are making
these searches. In the time period I was looking at, it was as frequent as searches for “Lakers” and
“migraine”8 and “Daily Show” — so not a fringe9 search. And I was also shocked by where these
searches were located. If you had asked me, 'Where’s racism highest in the United States?'
before I saw this Google data I would have said the South.
If you think of our country’s history, of slavery10, the Civil War, we usually think of racism
as a Southern issue. But the places with the highest racist search volumes included western
Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, upstate New York, industrial Michigan.
The real divide in racism these days is not north versus south. It’s east versus west, where you get
a lot less of this west of the Mississippi River as compared to east of the Mississippi River.
And then if you remember the 2008 election, all the way back then when Barack Obama was
elected president, after the election there was this question: did people care that he was black?
And Gallup asked people and some other surveys asked people and 98 percent, 99 percent of

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zrozumienie
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anonimowy /əˈnɒnɪməs/
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zebrana, pogrupowana /ˈæɡrɪɡət/
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wskaźnik
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uderzająco
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rasistowskie
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wyśmiewać
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migrena /ˈmaɪɡreɪn/
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skrajne
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niewolnictwo

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Lesson 10
Author: KatarzynaLis
Contact me at: angielski.zajeciadodatkowe@gmail.com

Americans said “No, no, no, no—of course not. This was not a factor in our voting decision.”
But you actually see very, very clearly in the data that Obama did far worse than other previous
Democratic candidates in places with higher racist search volumes. And this isn’t explained by
anything else in the data. It’s not explained by demographics11 or gun ownership or church
attendance12 or liberalism. The main factor that predicts where Obama did worse than other
Democrats is how frequently they made racist searches on Google.
Anyway, this data kind of languished13 I think on my website for a while, but then during
the 2016 Republican Primary some data journalists got data on where Trump was doing best in
the Republican Primary. Trump, of course, was saying some very, very racially charged things and
people were expecting that these were gaffes14, that he would collapse because he was saying
things that you are not supposed to say, you know: retweeting false statistics about how
frequently African Americans commit crimes, or not repudiating15 support from a former leader of
the KKK, saying that Black Lives Matter protestors should be roughed up. And then what these
data journalists found is, the single highest predictor of where Trump was doing well was the
measure of racist searches on Google. So the same hidden racism that was secretly hurting
Obama was waiting for a candidate to support and helped Trump tremendously16 in the
Republican Primary.
So in the 2016 election one thing that was very, very clear in the data is that African
American turnout17 was going to be way down. Because if you looked at cities with 90 percent
black populations or 95 percent black populations, searches for information on voting were way
lower than the previous two elections. So this was a clue that Trump may do better than expected
because Clinton wasn’t going to get the same black support that Obama had gotten. And I think
as far as predicting the elections just based on searches, we’re not really there yet because we
haven’t had enough elections to test the models on. We’ve only had a few elections to build the
models, whereas polls have been building models over many, many elections. I think there
definitely are clues in searches for which way people will go. They’re a little more subtle than we
usually think. So, for example, you can’t predict which way a state is going to go based on how
frequently they search for a candidate. It’s not like places that search for Trump more go for
Trump and places that search for Clinton more go for Clinton. The problem, and you can probably
guess it’s obvious, is that you might search Trump because you love him or you might search
Trump because you hate him.
So it doesn’t really tell us too much. There are some subtle indicators18 that seem to have

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demografia
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chodzenie do / obecność
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podupadać,
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gafa, /ɡæf/
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odrzucić
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ogromnie
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frekwencja wyborcza
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wskaźnik

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Lesson 10
Author: KatarzynaLis
Contact me at: angielski.zajeciadodatkowe@gmail.com

predictive powers. One that I’ve found is the order in which people search candidates. About 26
percent of searches for Clinton in the previous election cycle also included the word Trump. So
people searched for Clinton Trump polls19 or Trump Clinton debate. And it turns out, interestingly
there’s a subtle clue20 in which way people will go based on the order in which they list the
candidates in their search. So if people search Trump Clinton polls they’re much more likely to
go Trump. If people search Clinton Trump polls they’re much more likely to go Clinton.
But it’s going to take a lot of elections to kind of build these models and weight these models
and figure out exactly how to translate the searches to vote totals. But I think there is some
information in these searches for the purposes of predicting elections.

based on http://bigthink.com/videos/do-your-google-searches-reveal-the-real-you

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wybory/liczba oddanych głosów
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wskazówka