Hey Business Insider! any publicity is publicity. Plus you don’t need my publicity.
Though when I start my data analysis and warehousing company, I will use your article in the very first interview. If applicants don’t start laughing during the first 10 sec they are out. Unless they cry, or they get angry. Or they double-check the header thinking they are reading the Onion. Anyhow if they finally but late realized or were convinced that this is crap from every single aspect, they will be treated nicely but no job. And if… If they defended the article I would make sure there is a global black list to ban them lifetime from all activities related to data.
How do they allow themselves to publish this when they know “search results varies based on the searcher’s history, the time and place of search”.
Cause “they do say at least a little bit about how countries are perceived”?
Absolutely not.
They haven’t even checked with a friend next door to see s/he would get completely different results. In Norway I and my colleague asked Google the exact formulation:
How much * does cost in New Zeland
Autocomplete gave me: to live, build a house, abortion and to study. My colleague got food, petrol, university, gas, minecraft for NZ. The author got “vasectomy” possibly not even due to his country of search but relevant to his own search history. Then he labels every single country in the world by a totally random buzzword and gets an article in the Business Insider? Bravo!
Asking an uninteresting question, forming an irrelevant hypothesis, doing an absolutely wrong methodology on someone else’s data, representing it with a naive medium of visualization, and then lying in the title.
I had not seen something nearly careless at this level.
I try to summarize: First it gives an impression that these are top searches performed by the people in any country. That comes from the misleading title that actually changed a couple of times and finally got worse. If you struggle to make sense of this and you think it is about other countries’ perception about that country, you are still wrong. Finally you start to doubt the author and think it’s at least about how Americans perceive the world since he lives in the US. Not even that. It’s the authors search recommendation, apparently influenced bye is very own search history .
It’s like publishing an article on your personal recommendation and suggesting it to others as if the recommendation services with their fancy algorithms couldn’t do it for them.
Business Insider doesn’t need to apologize to the world for the silly stereotyping. That’s widely common and you can forgive or pity it as an effort-saving short cut to conserve mental processing energy. This article is unique in terms of ignorance combined with uncalibrated self-confidence. This is too bad to ignore.