The scale from the map was later correlated with the final percentage of votes Barack Obama received in each state. He achieved that by creating a map of racially charged states using Google searches that included the word “n****r” and measured how popular such searches were across the country. He famously argued his point, in a n NewYork Times article in which he demonstrated that racial aversion played a huge role in the presidential election in the United States in 2009 and that Barack Obama, as a future president had to overcome far more adversity than anyone had expected or any election poll at the time had revealed. Davidowitz believes the conditions under which people search on Google – most likely on their private devices, and alone – are more suited for gathering real opinions, concerns, and sentiments of people, than traditional surveys. It aged well, and managed to attract a varied pool of devotees, that includes marketers, journalists and scientists who turn to it whenever they struggle to decipher human psyche – in other words, always when on duty.Īmong its die-hard practitioners is Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a scientist whose PhD thesis was based on data from Google Trends, and who was among the first to position the tool as an alternative to traditional sociological research, which he thinks often fails to quantify human behaviours with precision. Google Trends is a handy marketing tool that was launched over 14 years ago for measuring the popularity of search queries in Google’s search engine across the globe. Google Trends is believed to help predict everything from market movements to the most popular Halloween costumes, but what happens if we try to predict political elections with it?
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