An author suggests Google search result data gives us better indicators of attitudes toward insecurity, race, and sex than surveys:

I think there’s two. One is depressing and kind of horrifying. The book is called Everybody Lies, and I start the book with racism and how people were saying to surveys that they didn’t care that Barack Obama was black. But at the same time they were making horrible racist searches, and very clearly the data shows that many Americans were not voting for Obama precisely because he was black.

I started the book with that, because that is the ultimate lie. You might be saying that you don’t care that [someone is black or a woman], but that really is driving your behavior. People can say one thing and do something totally different. You see the darkness that is often hidden from polite society. That made me feel kind of worse about the world a little bit. It was a little bit frightening and horrifying.

But, I think the second thing that you see is a widespread insecurity, and that made me feel a little bit better. I think people put on a front, whether it’s to friends or on social media, of having things together and being sure of themselves and confident and polished. But we’re all anxious. We’re all neurotic.

That made me feel less alone, and it also made me more compassionate to people. I now assume that people are going through some sort of struggle, even if you wouldn’t know that from their Facebook posts.

We know surveys have flaws and there are multiple ways – from sampling, to bad questions, to nonresponse, to social desirability bias (the issue at hand here) – they can be skewed.

But, these flaws wouldn’t lead me to these options:

1. Thinking that search results data provides better information. Who is doing the searching? Are they a representative population? How clear are the patterns? (It is common to see stories based on the data but that provide no numbers. “Illinois” might be the most misspelled word in the state, for example, but by a one search margin and with 486 to 485 searches).
2. Thinking that surveys are worthless on the whole. They still tell us something, particularly if we know the responses to some questions might be skewed. In the example above, why would Americans tell pollsters they have more progressive racial attitudes that they do? They have indeed internalized something about race.
3. That attitudes need to be measured as accurately as possible. People’s attitudes often don’t line up with their actions. Perhaps we need more measures of attitudes and behaviors rather than a single good one. The search result data cited above could supplement survey data and voting data to better inform us about how Americans think about race.