| This is a super misleading visualization. I caught wind of this yesterday and started doing some digging. There are some broad issues with this. 1. As others have mentioned, this is them playing with not true misspellings, but the phrase "how to spell X". These are very different things. 2. I don't believe these are actually the true "top searches" in each state. They did some magic here to, I suspect, normalize for the most common of these searches in the English language and then pick the most anomalous search. Otherwise this viz would probably be very boring and just be filled with some of the harder to spell English words. 3. Further evidence this is based on "corrected rank" or something. Looking at the state of Texas, the search for "how to spell beautiful" is much more common than the search for "how to spell maintenance", which their viz claims is the "top" search for Texas. Search for "Beautiful" makes much more sense considering its frequency of use in the English language. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US-TX&q=how%20t... 4. The original version that came out misspelled the word "ninety", which was pretty humorous considering this will be used by thousands to talk about how terrible it is that people can't spell and how autocorrect is ruining america, etc etc. Of course we should all be shocked that a tweet was somehow unable to convey nuance and detail of a quantitative analysis. /sarcasm edit: The original source was a tweet: https://twitter.com/GoogleTrends/status/869624196921303040/p... |