I am interested in exploring Google as a representation of the collective thoughts of society. In this way Google acts as an entity. How can Google’s predictive text give an insight into what the greater public is thinking about? I am interested in using this context to examine what the public asks Google about fortune 500 companies.

I built a sketch in processing that runs through an array of all of the fortune 500 companies and scrapes the predictive text results for “is (company name here)…”.

Here’s my code:

https://github.com/rachciav/predictive_search

Here’s the first few results of my scraping:

Reponse Content: [“is Chevron”,[“is chevron good gas”,”is chevron an american company”,”is chevron a buy”,”is chevron gas better”,”is chevron a good buy”,”is chevron a good stock to buy”,”is chevron gas the best”,”is chevron in style”,”is chevron out”,”is chevron hiring”]]

Reponse Content: [“is AFLAC”,[“is aflac worth it”,”is aflac health insurance”,”is aflac worth the cost”,”is aflac worth it 2014″,”is aflac dental worth it”,”is aflac insurance worth it”,”is aflac taxable”,”is aflac a goose or a duck”,”is aflac pre tax”,”is aflac commision only”]]

Reponse Content: [“is Applied Industrial Technologies”,[“is applied industrial technologies a good place to work”,”what is applied industrial technologies”]]

Reponse Content: [“is Charter Communications”,[“is charter communications down”,”is charter communications good”,”is charter communications available in my area”,”is charter communications owned by comcast”,”is charter communications a good place to work”,”is charter communications being sold”,”is charter communications open today”,”is charter communications going all digital”,”is charter communications a good company to work for”,”is charter communications a fortune 500″]]

I haven’t entirely settled on what I want to do with this data yet, but the results have been interesting so far. It might be insightful to pair this data with a company’s net worth or area of business. Are wealthier companies perceived of in a more positive of negative light?