Seen At 11: New Yorkers Asked Google 'Am I An Alcoholic' And 'Who Killed Biggie'
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Many people rely on Internet searches, quickly learning things like "the fastest downtown," "the closest deli," or "the right tip amount."
But, as CBS2's Dave Carlin reported, there are also those other questions.
"I sometimes fall into a Google home where you are at the same thing in a wormhole," Midtown resident Layla Alvandi said. "You're asking the Internet stupider and stupider questions."
Matt Bloch of Midtown said, "It's the anonymous question that you don't want to ask anyone else."
Real estate search site Estately used Google Autocomplete to get a list of hundreds of common and weird questions and then ran them through Google Trends to come up with state-by-state breakdowns.
New Yorkers asked "Am I an alcoholic?" and "What's a Millennial?" and "Who killed Biggie?"
"I actually searched 'who shot Biggie?' I wanted to know everything that happened that day," Maurice Clark of the South Bronx said.
Leah Hocking of the Upper West Side said she wasn't surprised that people would Google, "Am I an alcoholic?"
"That doesn't surprise me. All my friends I know are heavy drinkers," Hocking said.
Also making the Google list for New York was "is Mercury in retrograde?" In astrology, Mercury is the planet of objective thinking – our memory, our perception – all of our objective qualities – and all those qualities are adversely affected when the planet goes retrograde.
In New Jersey, people asked about the leading presidential candidates and also "How to make friends?" and "Is time travel possible?," among a few other things.
In Iowa, people want to know if penguins have knees.
Researchers at Estately said they think this information just might be useful for the person moving from one state to another who want a better idea of what's on people's minds there.
"You can choose based on what's important to you where you want to live," Estately spokeswoman Candace Ramirez said.
