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Top Ten Occult Cities
Was just doing some research on Google’s new Trends website, entered in the word “occult” and came up with some odd information. They list the top ten cities that have been searching for that term, and here is their list:
- Pittsburgh
- Austin
- Tampa
- St Louis
- Dallas
- Miami
- Sacramento
- Columbus
- Seattle
- Chicago
Why Pittsburgh tops that list, I have no idea. Having lived there for two years, this ranking doesn’t seem to make much sense. What I want to know is of all these people who have been searching for it - wherever they are - what were they hoping to find about it? Information for it, against it, or simple curiosity? Too bad Google can’t track that…
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May 12th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
It doesn’t make any sense that Miami would top Seattle in this listing. Nor Austin. Having recently lived in Austin, I know that while it has a nice little smattering of different groups, it is nothing like what can be found in Seattle.
May 12th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
Well, maybe it’s a better depiction of cities with people who have the most hunger for this sort of thing because they don’t have access to it in real life? I don’t know.
There’s also a remote possibility, I suppose, that my living in Pittsburgh for two years and writing almost full time for this website skewed the results in our favor…
May 12th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
“Those who know don’t tell, those who tell don’t know…..”
* tell = google-search??
May 12th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
Did you write that as a comment before or after my most recent post?
May 12th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
Before… But I guess I can see how it applies.
I picked up that saying in college in the 80s….
May 12th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
Miami actually makes perfect sense to me, given the Santeria community is fairly large there.
May 12th, 2006 at 8:42 pm
Call me a big fat stereotyper, but there are a lot of southern cities on the upper half of that list, and what I can’t help but envision is a lot of very superstitious Christians filled with intense and deeply instilled fears about the “dangers of the occult” researching ‘the enemy’ as part of spiritual warfare.
Anyone who had the same misfortune as I, of watching a certain “dark-sided” episode of Trading Spouses (the only episode I ever watched, I swear. It was an accident), might have the same mental picture going on that I do right now.
May 12th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
Pittsburgh I can’t explain, but I do know that Austin has a large occult community. otherwise, I think Allison has the right idea.
May 12th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
Just to add to what Allison said about the south….
Maybe Miami is topping Seattle b/c of the large Haitian population there. Haitians are notoriously stereotyped for occult practices - Vodou. There are other Caribbean/Latino populations there involved in Santeria and so forth. Between the heat, the sin, the occult, and the sex that presumably runs amok down here it’s surely “evil.” When I was living down there, one church minister said that Miami was the home of “Babylon the Great.”
May 13th, 2006 at 11:22 am
I am suprised New Orleans was not on the list. Even after Katrina I thought there would still be a large occult population. Or what about San Francisco? So many interesting stores of people there it boggles my little mind.
May 13th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Weird, I was doing the same thing and was reviewing the countries. India came up number one, though that also has to do with their massive population. It’d be more interesting to find numbers per capita.
Pittsburgh, though, eh?
May 13th, 2006 at 10:48 pm
WEIRD. That’s pretty much where I’m from.
May 14th, 2006 at 1:56 am
“I am suprised New Orleans was not on the list. Even after Katrina I thought there would still be a large occult population.”
I think New Orleans might be secretly anti-internet. Or anti-something. God knows they can hardly support their bookstores.
There is a large occult population in NOLA. Huge, really. Not at all like in the movies. A lot of it is pure tourist hogwash. But there’s also a great deal of true form voodoo. And my own half-ass magic seemed to work a lot better down there. But then, the backlash was also equally strong. All my money spells seemed to be financed by ME losing the exact SAME amount of money just a month later.
May 14th, 2006 at 2:46 am
The fact that Denver’s not on this list makes even more perfect sense than Pittsburgh being #1.
May 14th, 2006 at 2:55 am
It appears the rankings have changed since your posting Tim. What’s going on with Cincinnati? What’s with the algorithims in “google trends” that makes search terms so damed fluid, if not fickle? To me, it’s but another example of how important it is that databases not under your control must be perpetually fucked around with. Databases are shite and unworthy of their voracious consumption of humans.
1. Cincinnati United States
2. Tampa United States
3. Rochester United States
4. Dallas United States
5. Austin United States
6. Seattle United States
7. Portland United States
8. Los Angeles United States
9. St Louis United States
10. Sacramento United States
May 14th, 2006 at 9:54 am
All this says is that the rankings are time-dependent. It would be interesting not only to normalize by population but also time-shift the data by time zone (since the time-series is almost certainly driven by work schedules).
May 14th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
A couple years ago I compiled some results from meetup.com’s listings of popularity of certain meetups by city: http://www.technoccult.com/archives/20...ty-of-hobbies-by-geographic-location/
How does google trends work? is it based on where the search terms are originating? or is based on something like local media or something?
May 15th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
And if you think me writing about this is frivolous, then you ought to enjoy this full-on Reuters article about how Ireland is the “loneliest” place in the world because more people searched for the term “lonely” there than anywhere else.
http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtm...oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=12205484
According to that article, it is indeed determined by where the searches originate.