Here’s What We Google Most About Each State

Google Search's autocomplete functionality is just a gem. It pools responses from your search history, and that of the billion other internet users out there, and tries to predict the rest of your query as you're typing. And boy, what other people are googling — it's interesting, that's for sure. Mental Floss tasked Google with the question "Why does [state]..." for each of the 50 states. The results were illuminating, you can check them out below. Perhaps, due to the date of the search, a number of responses are voting and politics-related. For Pennsylvania, the response is "Vote Democrat;" for California, it's "Have the most seats in the House;" and for Iowa, it's "Vote early." Some were surprisingly intelligent queries, such as why does Indiana "Have a teacher shortage," and why does Oklahoma "Have so many earthquakes." Others were what you might expect from the internet masses, such as "Why does Florida... Suck," "Why does Nebraska... Smell," and for North Dakota, West Virginia, Rhode Island, and Delaware, why do they "Exist." For the full graphic, head here. If you try googling all this yourself, you may find you get slightly different results. For instance, for New York, the top autocomplete option that shows up for me is "Have rats," and for Maine, it's "have the highest cancer rate." Maybe I need to step up my googling habits.