This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Utahns don't type the N-word into Google search engines very often. And neither do people in the western United States.
A team of university professors came up with a novel way to identify the nation's most racist areas. Using three years of Google searches broken down by media markets, the team found that people in the South and East, and particularly areas around the Appalachian mountain range, use the racist term in searches far more than the national average.
The new study, published in PLOS ONE, draws a correlation between areas with more racist Google searches and poor health outcomes for black residents, which corroborates past research.
The study, focused on 2004 through 2007, doesn't identify the number of racist searches by area, instead it identifies how close an area is to the national average. All of Utah is significantly below the average. The study tried to control for searches of the N-word that were not intended to be racist, though it is possible that some of the searches were not intended to be racist. And obviously, not all racists use the N-word in Internet searches.
Generally, the areas with higher racist searches tend to have large black populations, though it may surprise some that the East, particularly in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, ranked higher than much of the South.