“Barack Obama” vs “Barack Hussein Obama” Autocomplete suggestions

Below are two word clouds generated by pulling Google Autocomplete data for a series of basic who/what/when/where/why questions about President Obama*. Each question was asked with the President’s name specified first as “Barack Obama,” and again as “Barack Hussein Obama.” The difference in results can be seen by toggling the buttons at the top of the visualization.

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama

Loading

The answer to “What is missing at Barack Hussein Obama’s press conference?” is “the US flag,” according to conspiracy theorists.

People aren’t looking for information about the issues when they’re searching for “Barack Hussein Obama.” In fact, there were no autocomplete suggestions at all for questions such as “What is Barack Hussein Obama’s plan for ”.

If you’re interested in the full data set of crowdsourced autocomplete results, it’s available (anonymized) in CSV format here or as a Google Fusion Table here. If you make something with it, please let me know.

Tomorrow’s election day! Make sure you get out and vote!

Methodology: data was gathered across 36 states (16 blue, 12 red, 8 swing) via a script written by Justin Hileman. The questions are here.