Minnesota is awesome, says Google auto-complete
Categories: How we look to the national media
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| 1 Malaysian. 1 Minnesotan. 1 Minneapolis. blog |
| Our awesomeness literally drips onto Wisconsin. |
Using Google's auto-complete function, blogger Renee DiResta recently investigated which characterizations are most often associated with each state.
She entered 'why is [insert state here] so' and took note of which term came up. For 18 states, including North Dakota and Iowa, the top result was 'boring.' Fewer states are associated with positive qualities, but Minnesota is one of them.
From DiResta's blog (via the Daily Mail):
The qualitative searches were most interesting to me. There are 12 unique terms that are classifiable as "culture/sentiment" queries, of which ten are negative: backwards, bad, boring, crazy, dangerous, hated, racist, stupid, trashy, weird.It's no surprise the Land O 10,000 Lakes is associated with awesomeness. But Texas? The only awesome thing from there that springs to mind is that Rolling Stones live album from 1978.
There were a few redeeming positive results; Colorado, Minnesota, Texas, and Vermont are "awesome," and Montana, New Hampshire, and New York are "great".
But for the most part, it doesn't seem like we think very nice things about each other... at the very least, we're more inclined to search for articles supporting (or related to) negative biases.
The single most common result of all was "boring," which appeared for 18 states with no particular regional concentration. Other popular terms (returned for >10 states) were "humid", "windy", "expensive", and "liberal". Strangely, Connecticut and Pennsylvania both returned "haunted"; apparently there are a lot of ghost sightings (and related walking tours). My favorite result of all was "enchanting": New Mexico is beautiful.
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