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"Historically, pollsters have tried to gauge the effect of racism in political campaigns through traditional polls. But a new study uses Google to tease out a greater level of accuracy that polls could never achieve.\nThe biggest issue with using polls to detect accurate levels of racism is that they heavily rely on those being polled to admit to their own racism. This is problematic in two ways: First, you're missing self-acknowledged racists who aren't comfortable admitting their views to a stranger. Secondly, you're missing out on those who deny their own racist tendencies, but has them nonetheless. This is where Google comes in.\nIn his paper, The Effects of Racial Animus on a Black Presidential Candidate: Using Google Search Data to Find What Surveys Miss, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz of Harvard University breaks down the number of racially charged Google search terms by state in an attempt to get a n idea of racist sentiments in a given area. Using searches from between 2004-2007 to try and gauge cause-and-effect instead of mere correlation, Stephens-Davidowitz put together the following list of states according to the level of their racist searches.\nAs for how Stephens-Davidowitz arrived at these numbers, here's how he explains it in his own words (warning: racial epithets):\n\nThe baseline proxy that I use is the percentage of an area's total Google searches from 2004-2007 that included the word \"nigger\" or \"niggers,\" I choose the most salient word to constrain data-mining. I do not include data after 2007 to avoid capturing reverse causation, with dislike for Obama causing individuals to use racially charged language on Google. My regression analysis includes 196 of 210 media markets, encompassing more than 99% of American voters.The epithet is a common term used on Google. During the period 2004-2007, there were roughly the same number of Google searches that included the word nigger(s) as there were Google searches that included words and phrases such as \"migraine(s),\" \"economist,\" \"sweater,\" \"Daily Show\" and \"Lakers\" (Google data are case-insensitive.) The most common searches including the epithet (such as \"nigger jokes\" and \"I hate niggers\") return websites with derogatory material about African-Americans. The top hits for the top racially charged searches are nearly all textbook examples of antilocution, a majority group's sharing stereotype-based jokes using coarse language outside a minority group's presence.\nThe estimated effect is somewhat larger when adding controls for an area's Google search volume for other terms that are moderately correlated with search volume for \"nigger,\" but are not evidence for racial animus. In particular, I control for searches including other terms for African-Americans (\"African American\" and \"nigga,\" the alternate spelling used in nearly all rap songs that include the word) and profane language.\nThe results imply that, relative to the most racially tolerant areas in the United States, prejudice cost Obama between 3.1 percentage points and 5 percentage points of the national popular vote. This implies racial animus gave Obama's opponent roughly the equivalent of a home-state advantage country-wide.\n\nIt's a pretty staggering impact but, it's worth noting that, as The Atlantic points out, popular vote isn't the only thing that matters in a presidential election. The Electoral College is specifically designed to filter the popular vote. Still, these levels of racism could, and may, have a material effect on the 2012 election.\nAside from drudging up hard data on the racists attitudes of American citizens \u2014 or at least highlight American citizens likelihood to type racial epithets into a search engine \u2014 this study shows how Google doesn't only direct us to webpages, but it's also building a valuable database of social mores. By its very nature, Google is essentially an anonymous poll that compels us to use it. But it's not always the search engine that's doing the searching.\nImage courtesy jurvetson, Flickr."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/06/12/google-searches-show-racism/>