A deep dive into Google Search data led us on a somewhat disturbing journey into the American psyche.
If you’re the tiniest bit curious about your fellow humans, we bet that when you type the first part of a phrase into Google, you can’t resist waiting a millisecond see what suggestions appear in the all-seeing search box. It’s usually goofy, confusing or sad. But every once in a while, Google Search shakes your soul.
A couple of months back, amid a now-forgotten search, we paused on “how to …” and the search box completed with “how to kill cicadas.”
What?! Who sees the raw, pre-Columbian abundance of a cicada brood emergence — they were popping up across much of the country at the time — and thinks, “These clumsy, screamy little weirdos deserve to die?” By the time you see them, the periodic ones probably only have a few days or weeks left to live. What the heck is the hurry?
We feared it may speak to something deeper in the American psyche: the impulse among many folks, when confronted with an unfamiliar animal or insect on their property, to evoke a bastardization of the already questionable castle doctrine and kill it where it stands.
To find out, we combed Google Trends and pulled down hundreds of files on two decades of U.S. search habits, seeking an unfiltered glimpse into what Americans are trying to kill.
Google makes its trends data accessible and easy to use. It’s the lowest-hanging fruit in data journalism and the source behind a lot of screwy rankings. But done right, it allows us to peek at impulses that folks aren’t willing to air in public. Always optimistic, we hoped the results of this dive into America’s id would be fun and harmless.
Occasionally, it was. A great many Americans, especially in rural areas, want to know “how to kill time.” Our passion for distraction climbed during pandemic lockdowns and was slow to subside.
But many searches weren’t so benign. Fair warning: This column’s discussion of Google searches gets progressively more awful. So if that’s the kind of thing that would ruin your day, feel free to bail out now.
We’ll start with bugs. The ongoing insect apocalypse does not seem to have registered with homeowners. Insects — and insectlike entities, since Google searchers aren’t always clear on their taxonomy — are one of the few things Americans want to kill even more than time.
By our count, bugs make up more than half of the top 100 entities we’re trying to kill. The rankings aren’t precise, as folks sometimes split their vote between multiple phrases, such as “how to kill centipede,” “how to kill a centipede” and “how to kill centipedes.” But for the most part, we were struck by how consistently Americans described their targets.
Ants, fleas and flies top the insect list. Each of the three has enjoyed some time at the top, but it really depends on when and where you’re searching. Anger against ants hits its apex in May and June. Our wrath shifts to fleas and flies as summer drags on.
What really drew us, though, was the geography. Did you know America’s got a Flea Belt, centered around the South and Appalachia? Someone from Mississippi or West Virginia is more than 10 times as likely to search for “how to kill fleas” than their buddy in the Mountain West.
Folks focus on killing flies in northern states while they aim for ants in the southern half of the country, an area which not coincidentally overlaps with the range of the invasive and unpleasant fire ant.
Cicadas rank mercifully low, in part because they don’t emerge on our radar all that often. But you don’t have to look far to see folks trying to kill benign or even beneficial bugs. Those of us who lie awake mourning the loss of pollinators will be alarmed to see “bees,” “carpenter bees” and “ground bees” on the list. Each have their own large section of the country that wants them dead.
Searches for killing plants don’t inspire the same gut-level horror. The top targets either sound too vague to parse — such as grass, mold or “a tree” — or are invasive species such as ivy or crabgrass. But they all make for magnificent maps, as our rooted rivals vary substantially by region.
We tackle thistle in the plains and prairies; bittersweet in the Northeast; blackberry bushes in the Northwest; Johnson grass and kudzu in the South; something or someone called “creeping Charlie” in the Midwest; and, of course, “goat heads” in Idaho, where we don’t seem to be making much headway despite decades of tireless pull-on-sight efforts from their archnemesis, one Bill Van Dam.
Searches for killing animals, on the other hand, take a dark turn. We can understand why New Englanders Google how to kill a lobster. And we discounted how to kill mockingbirds for obvious novel-related reasons. But we’ll never forgive the folks, many of them in South and Sun Belt, who are googling how to kill lizards or frogs. We have a hard time conjuring up a situation in which a squishy amphibian or retiring reptile has committed a capital offense.
The generous interpretation would be that folks are targeting problematic species — some areas have encouraged hunting invasive frogs and lizards. They could also be harvesting animals for food, as with the aforementioned aquatic arthropods, or fish or chickens. But that breaks down when you learn the most searched for “how to kill” animals are, by far, cats or dogs.
Veterans of any of a multitude of tear-jerking children’s novels can dream up charitable interpretations of those searches. But those charitable interpretations are called into question by the fact that searches for how to kill a dog or cat closely parallel, in both time and geography, searches for “how to get rid of a dog” and “how to get rid of a cat.”
Sadly, it turns out the most popular how-to-kill search of all time is “how to kill yourself.” (We’re as distressed by this as you are.) Such searches bear little relationship to suicide rates from 2004 to 2020 as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the blessedly less popular “how to kill myself” shows a stronger correlation.
The almost-good news is this: The long run of “yourself” as the most popular of the “how to kill” searches may be coming to an end. It’s recently been passed by searches for “how to kill time” and, more notably, searches for “how to kill someone.” The latter term surged to new heights as we locked down to stop the spread of the coronavirus, and kept climbing.
A wiser, less data-dependent columnist might spin this as a symbol of where we’re at as a country. Anger and stress we once directed toward ourselves now gets aimed at others. But absent proof, we have to wonder if it’s just a quirk of the data. A Google spokesperson pointed out searches for both terms are relatively infrequent, so we fear they may be affected by changes in how the search engine processes data, or by Americans changing the way we search in response to a meme or some other shift in popular culture.
After all, charting actual CDC death data doesn’t produce a tidy reproduction of the Google searches. Even as searches for “how to kill yourself” have fallen, the rate of suicide has remained tragically steady. And after a sharp pandemic spike, the rate at which Americans kill each other has fallen since 2021.
