If you weren’t aware, Google has info on our searches just sitting around. Since we, as a nation, make millions and millions of searches every week, you’d expect that Google has quite a bit of that information.
Today, they’ve put it to good use by taking some specific search terms and cross referencing them by region to come up with this fun little map of the United States based on popular campaign issues.
“The United States is a nation composed of unique regions, values, and identities. During presidential election years the media narrative tends to focus on a handful of key swing states. Here on the +Google Politics & Elections team, we wanted to take a step back and examine the nation as a whole. We took seven hot-button political issues and mapped how their +Google search interest varied by state,” says Google Politics in a Google+ post.
Compiling roughly a year’s worth of searches, Google looked at terms related to gun control, abortion, social security, gay marriage, national debt, tax cuts, and marijuana legalization.
Where search terms regarding “abortion” were the most searched probably won’t surprise you. The bulk came from southern states like Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia. New York and D.C. also logged high search quantity for the term. States in the west dominated the “national debt” searches, including Idaho, Montana, Utah, and North & South Dakota. My home state of Kentucky led searches on marijuana legalization.
No comment.
Check out Google’s map below:
