Now with college teachers!
What do doctors, lawyers, police, and librarians Google? I’ll tell you. But first — if you are going to take this too seriously, please stop now.
Data and Method
Using IPUMS to extract data from the 2010-2012 American Community Survey, I count the number of people ages 25-64, currently employed, in a given occupation. I divide that by each state’s population in that age range (excluding Washington DC from all analyses). I enter those numbers into the Google Correlate tool to see which searches are most highly correlated with the distribution of each occupation across states (the tool reports the top 100 most correlated searches). In other words, these are searches that maximize the difference between, for example, high-lawyer and low-lawyer states — searches that are relatively popular where there are a lot of lawyers, and relatively unpopular where there are not a lot of lawyers.
Is this what lawyers actually Google? We can’t know. But I think so. Or maybe what people who work in law firms do, or people who live with lawyers. It’s a very sensitive tool. I made this case first in the post, Stuff White People Google. Check that out if you’re skeptical.
For each occupation, I first offer a few highly correlated searches that support the idea that the data are capturing what these people search for. Then I list some of the interesting other hits from each list.
Results
Police
The map of police per adult looks pretty random, but the list of correlated search terms doesn’t. On the list are “security training,” “tsa jobs,” “waist belt,” “weight vest,” and “air marshals.”
After all the security stuff, the only major category left in the 100 searches most correlated with police in the population is women. Specifically, their search taste includes tough actress Rachel Ticotin, body builder Denise Masino, Brazilian actress Alice Braga, actress Rosario Dawson, and, “israeli women.” (Remember, Google suppresses known porn terms, so this is just what got through the filter.) It’s a leap from this data to the statement, “police search for images of these women,” but this is who they would find if that were the case (is this a “type”?):
Librarians
On the other hand, librarians. They are the smallest occupation I tried: the average state population aged 25-64 is only one tenth of one percent librarians. Yet, their distribution leaves an unmistakable trace in the Google search patterns. It especially seems to pick up terms associated with public libraries. Correlated terms include, “cataloguing,” and “quiet hours.” And then there are terms one might ask a librarian about, classic reference-desk questions such as, “which vs that,” “turn off track changes,” “think tanks,” “9/11 commission,” and “irs form 6251”; and term paper topics like Shakespeare titles or “human development report.”
What about the librarians themselves, or those close to them? Could it be they who are searching for Ann Taylor dresses, Garnet Hill free shipping, Lands End home, and textile museums? We can’t know for sure. Of course, if anyone knows how to cover their search tracks, it might be this crowd.
Doctors
You know they’re doctors, because the search terms most correlated the map include “md, mph,” “md, phd,” “nejm,” “journal medicine,” “tedmed,” and “groopman.” What else do they like? Chic Corea, Tina Fey, Larry David, Mad Men (season 1) and The West Wing, Laura Linney, John Oliver, Scrabble 2-letter words, and a bunch of Jewish stuff.
Lawyers
That’s the map of lawyers per adult across states. Is it really lawyers? The top 100 searches correlated with the distribution shown above include “general counsel,” and then a lot of financial terms like, “world economic forum,” “international finance corporation,” and “economist intelligence.” Then there are international travel terms, like, “rate euro dollar,” “royal air,” and “swiss embassy.”
Looks like lawyers in lawyer-land are richer and more finance-oriented than lawyers in general. On the cultural side, they search for clothing terms Massimo Dutti, Hugo Boss, and Benetton. They apparently like to eat at Zafferano in London, and drink Caipirinhas. Also, they like “vissi,” which is an aria from Tosca but also a Cypriot celebrity; I lean toward the latter, because Queen Rania is also on the list. Finally, they combine their interests in law, finance, and wealthy attractive women by searching for Debrahlee Lorenzana, the “too-hot-for-work” banker.
By popular demand: Post-secondary teachers
Finally, here without comment are the results for “post-secondary teachers,” which includes any college teacher who didn’t instead specify a specialty, such as “psychologist” or “economist.” (It’s hard to see on the map, but Rhode Island is the highest.) I broke the results into four rough categories:
Academic
| attribution |
| balderdash |
| bmi index |
| body image |
| citation style |
| cpdl |
| critical theory |
| debt to equity |
| debt to equity ratio |
| democracy in america |
| dihedral |
| economic inequality |
| economic statistics |
| economists |
| educause |
| edward elgar |
| effect size |
| email forward |
| equals sign |
| exogenous |
| feminists |
| google scholar |
| growth rates |
| homomorphism |
| inflation rate |
| inflation rates |
| intelligibility |
| international study |
| isomorphic |
| journal of |
| journal of nutrition |
| marginal propensity |
| marginal propensity to consume |
| mediating |
| meters per second |
| milieu |
| overlaying |
| piano sonata |
| prefrontal |
| prefrontal cortex |
| profile of |
| psychology studies |
| quick ratio |
| rejection letter |
| returns to scale |
| routledge |
| scholar |
| subgroup |
| superscript |
| transglutaminase |
| ways to end a letter |
Personal
| 1% milk |
| 2006 olympics |
| best pump up songs |
| crib safety |
| easy halloween costume |
| graco snug |
| handel |
| ipod history |
| jackson superbowl |
| janet jackson superbowl |
| mastermind game |
| maxim online |
| minesweeper |
| most popular names |
| napping |
| national sleep foundation |
| olympic figure skating |
| olympics 2006 |
| pairs figure skating |
| positioning |
| refereeing |
| sandra boynton |
| senior hockey |
| snl clips |
| stuff magazine |
| stumbled upon |
| toilet training |
| verum |
Musical
| 1812 overture |
| acapella group |
| acapella groups |
| africa toto |
| ave verum |
| for the longest time |
| it breaks my heart |
| pdq bach |
| taylor swift |
Birth control
| apri |
| apri birth control |
| aviane |
Conclusions
Poor social scientists, generations of them spending their lives raising a few thousand dollars to ask a few thousand people a few hundred stilted, arbitrary survey questions. Meanwhile, coursing through the cable wires below their feet, and through the air around them, billions of data bits carry so much more potential information about so many more people, in so many intimate aspects of their lives, then we could even dream of getting our hands on. Just think of the power!
Note: I’ve done many posts like this. Some use time series instead of geographic variation, some use terms from Google Books ngrams. Browse the series under the Google tag, or check out this selection:
- Marriage is going down, so what does Kanye West have to do with it?
- What do Jews Google on Christmas?
- Obama Top Chef Romney Founding Fathers
- Gun Google searches and suicide
- Abstinence, Antichrist and teen births
- Googling racism, votes for Obama, and population composition
Family Inequality 
Did you try professor, or is the SOC code — IIRC, post-secondary teacher, except those who chose the underlying discipline (e.g., sociologist, chemist) — too broad and noisy to see any patterns?
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Oh. I never use that occupation, but you’re right. There are 1.2 million of them. I’m not sure you (we) want the results. But what the heck.
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