Google Search exposes how different countries perceive each other

Apparently, Australians and Brits are having trouble making pancakes. Brits seem to be the only ones to know how to tie their ties among their Commonwealth and American counterparts. Many are confused about whether America is a country or a continent, and those same people wonder if Canada is part of it.

This is what Noah Veltman discovered when he entered various search questions and the Google Search Engine completed his sentences with the most popular entries in “America,” Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. It gives us a humorous, but quite depressing graph of how these four nations perceive themselves and one another, views that reinforce old and new stereotypes.

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Canada seems to be having an inner conflict with itself, thinking it’s “so great” and “awesome,” but “boring”, and “in Afghanistan.” Its friends all agree that Canada is "awesome" and "nice", but they are not sure why it’s a country, or a developed one for that matter.

If the latest Google search suggestions for Canada might sound hurtful for any proud Canuck, I don’t recommend typing a more "exotic" location in there. Typing Iraq or Afghanistan will surely lead to more problematic results than the ones wanting that we are boring, or that Brits are arrogant.

Studying public opinion in real time and at different locations remains an amazing opportunity, rendered possible ever since the creation of the Google Search Engine. In 1997, Larry Page and Sergei Brin developed the PageRank technology, creating an algorithm that has since been used to power the world's most popular web search tool.

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Useless to say, those technological advances bring forward the best of human innovation. And, as the latest graph by Noah Veltman shows, they also provide a detailed survey of many users' stereotypes.