If you’re still searching for a distinctive Halloween costume, you’d be well advised to steer clear of any Batman or Star Wars character getups.
That’s according to Google, at least, which has once again demonstrated it may actually know you better than you know yourself. Frightgeist, the newest tool produced by Google’s News Lab project, analyzes reams of search data to identify the top 500 costume searches made in the United States since 2006. It then organizes and maps them based on where those searches were generated, revealing both national and local costume trends.
Nationally, Harley Quinn (the sultry Batman villain) took the cake this year, followed by “Star Wars” characters, “Superhero,” “Pirate” and (of course) Batman.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, Star Wars led, trailed by “Superhero,” “Pirate,” Minnie Mouse and Batman. The most “unusually popular” costume in the region is, oddly enough, Sarah Sanderson, the witch played by Sarah Jessica Parker in the 1993 Disney film Hocus Pocus. Who’d a thunk?
In the map below, bubbles are sized by “normalized search volume,” explains Google News Lab’s data editor Simon Rogers. “That is basically the proportion of all searches in each place that are for Halloween costumes. That’s how you can use Google data to compare a a small place to a big place.”