Google Trends Surprise

Google Trends is a fun tool. It allows you to track the relative degree of frequency of words or terms used in google searchers. Since Google is the dominant search engine, it is close to an instantaneous tool for monitoring what is on the mind of your fellow citizen or fellow human.

But the more you play with it, the more you realize how suggestive it is rather than how conclusive it might be. It goes beyond simply the issue of whether google might be manipulating its own data, raised in It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

I have an example that illustrates the nuance of interpreting the results.

A few days ago, I was trying to understand some statistical implication of some of the data collected around intra-racial police shootings. In clarifying that, I got to looking at intra-racial murders. And from that I looked at hate crimes based on race. From there I looked at implications of bias. Talk about a lot of nuance obfuscated by ideology.

The Washington Post and the Guardian have been collecting ongoing data about police shootings (a very useful media service). Their data, along with academic studies, pretty thoroughly dispenses with the argument that there is a racial component to police shootings. It simply isn't there from a causative perspective. Contextual community violence levels are by far the greater predictor of police shootings than is the race of victim or officer.

Contra the social justice narrative so prominently carried in the mainstream media, the causal evidence of institutional or even personal racial bias is quite weak. But that is a separate topic.

So that's the background. In getting to the issue of perceived bias, I used Google Trends to try and get a sense of relative concern about perceived "white racism" and, given the BLM movement and similar groups, perceived "black racism." My expectation was that the Google Trend line for "white racism" would be some orders of magnitude greater than "black racism." My assumption was that, regardless of the numbers, that there would be a prevailing assumption about "white racism." To my surprise, there is not such an assumption.




Instead, there are about 20% more searches about "black racism" than there are about "white racism." How can that be true given the pervasiveness and consistency of the mainstream media social justice perspective and narrative? Do Americans really believe there is more "black racism" than there is "white racism?" What is the context of these phrases in the searches?

Which leads me to question just what it is that Google Trends can actually tell us when we are having to question the state of mind of the searchers.

One line of thinking based on this data is that the population at large, and dramatically different from the mainstream media and the activists they indulge, is more concerned about black racism than they are about white racism. Were that true, that would be a fascinating divergence between the worldview of the media and elite and that of the public. Given the revolt of the despicables and deplorables here in the US and all over Europe, against the political and mainstream media elite, that is not an outrageous conclusion.

Intra-racial crime in America is mercifully rare. Most murders are committed within racial groupings. Something like 95% for African Americans are killed by other African Americans and about 85% of Whites by other Whites. But the split within intra-racial murders is lopsided. While intra-racial murders are a small percentage of all murders, Africans Americans murder about 5 times as many Whites as Whites murder African Americans. That lopsidedness would also be consistent with the surprising Google Trends data. But given that the mainstream media tends to ignore the statistics, just how well known are those numbers and to what degree would that knowledge influence Google searchers? I would guess pretty low.

Is the excess of searches on "black racism" due to people feeling like they already know everything there is to know about white racism (since it is so deeply assumed by the MSM and colors so much of their reporting) and therefore the disproportionate searches on "black racism" represents some issue about novelty? Perhaps. My instinct is that that explanation does not ring especially true.

Is it a function simply of the numerical imbalance of the races in America (80% White, 15% Black, 5% Asian)? In other words, because there are so many whites, perhaps they are most interested in instances of black racism and therefore search for it more. Even though blacks might also be searching on white racism a lot, because they are a small minority, they have less impact on the overall Google Trend numbers. Perhaps. That seems like at least a partial contributor.

Is it just a function of BLM and the riots? I ran the five year Google Trends view and it appears not. People search on "black racism" about 20% more than "white racism" over the whole five years, predating BLM.

I really don't know what is going on with these numbers and how to explain the popular focus on "black racism." I take away two thoughts.

1) I suspect that there is a much wider gulf in world views between all the rest of Americans and the 10-20% who are mainstream media consumers, i.e. the media, commercial, and political elite.

2) It is easy to glibly assume that Google Trends tells you obvious things when in fact the answers might be subject to a lot more nuanced interpretation.