Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/08/02/world-map-of-national-cost-obs.html
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Looks like Oregon, Wisconsin, and Vermont have their priorities in order.
Montana and Arkansas, looks like you’re doing all right, too.
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The choice of methodology (English language searches) means that the map shows the interests of inhabitants only in English-speaking countries, elsewhere it’s most probably tourists. Though actually, the rather awkward, country-wide phrasing of the search queries would probably be favored among foreigners in all cases.
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Russia has the right idea.
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You are correct. I’ve tried the same here in Brazil and in portuguese and I got iPhone 6 instead prostitutes.
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California is jealous of Colorado’s weed status.
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Absolutely broken methodology. For example, of course it asking how much * cost in Venezuela gets you “gallon of gas”
That question, in English, is what every single person in the world googles when they are told that it is the ultra cheapest gas in the world. That doesnt mean venezuelan actually ask themselves that - they know how much it is. Is the rest of the world that drives the result to relevance in Google’s algorithms.
Same for prostitutes in Thailand, ride a camel in Morocco…
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…a DNA test in Mississippi, an abortion in Alabama…
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On the US map a lot of factors that distort the world map are not relevant (like, for example again, who in Cuba is going to search IN ENGLISH for the price of cigars?). But still not very sound methodology, it just get ridiculously wrong in the international case
(And yep, didnt see that it was already pointed out :P)
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Oh yeah, I with you there, 100%. I was just ribbing the south.
I tried “in Spain” but in Spanish and got “the morning after pill”
“In Venezuela” in Spanish gets “in-vitro fertilization”…
… I swear there has to be another bias that I’m not aware of 
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You found another band name!
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Roger That!
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I really like the dichotomy between New Zealand and Australia. Kind of opposite sides of the same coin.
You have it all wrong. This shows what prices the world obsesses over in each country. In other words, it doesn’t mean that Cubans are fixated on cigar prices. It means that cigars are the thing that the world prices specifically in Cuba the most.
And, as bucaneer notes, when I said “the world” above, I meant “the English-speaking world”.
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This map doesn’t give us any insight into Russia’s ideas. It tells us what idea the English-speaking world has about Russia. (Russia, by the way, is not an English-speaking country.)
Pretty much. The only plausible map is that of the individual states in the U.S. and even then, the ‘data’ for that map should be taken with a grain of rock salt.
“Land” for Antartica and Greenland are a bit weird. Maybe Greenlanders (or the people who search pretending to be Greenlanders) are interested in arable coastal land. But in Antarctica?
Again, we aren’t saying that Antartica people are pricing land. We’re saying that English-speaking people, worldwide, are pricing land in Antartica.
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