Autocompleting Wrexham!
Doing the rounds at the moment is a ‘autocomplete’ view of places around the UK, so we thought we would take a look closer to home!
Google Autocomplete gives search suggestions before you type things in to try and help make searches quicker, and predict what you are going to search for.
The Autocomplete is based off data collected by previous searches, for example type Wrexham. and it will suggest com for us and gov.uk for the Council.
Such searches give an insight to what people search for, and to a degree how they perceive an area. A full graphic that has been doing the proverbial rounds online is below, but taking the phrases for Wrexham and Wales there are some interesting results…
Thankfully compared to some parts of the country we have got off easy, yet part of that is due to the low volumes of Wrexham related searches (prospective Glyndwr University students seem to peak at the moment!).
Geographic questions for our border town are high, with the famous ‘Wrexham Is The Name’ tune following the ‘is’ search pattern.
More pressing matters are covered by those wanting to know if KFC in town deliver, and it is nice to see that the ‘Wrexham is a dump’ is balanced by ‘Wrexham is a nice place to live’ searches!
We tried similar for Wales which provoked some quite odd searches including if Wales was or was not a country, verification that Wales is not England. Perhaps the most bizarre search based on a speculative generalised trait of a group of people – asking Google if Welsh people are racist:
The larger map of the UK with some selected quotes is below:
Apparently according to Google Autocomplete “Worcester is the Paris of the 80s”, so we think the above is pretty scientific.
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