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PV Sindhu’s silver medal at the Olympics was big news. As was the news that her caste dominated Google statistics.
In an article called ‘While PV Sindhu fought hard for a medal, many Indians Googled her caste’, The News Minute delved into Google analytics to conclude that 21st century India is still obsessed with regressive ideas of caste.
The facts stated in the article are however, grossly misleading, writes Sankrant Sanu for Indiafacts.
According to the article by The News Minute, Google Trends statistics for the term “pv sindhu caste” revealed a spike in August, especially during the time of her semi-final match in the Olympics.
“In August, there were at least 10 times more searches for her caste compared to July. So, effectively, millions of Indians have searched for her caste so far,” the article said.
Countering this assertion, Sanu writes that the conclusion that “millions of people” searched for her caste is erroneous.
“Before we look at their absolute data claims, note that Google Trends are relative (the value at the top of the graph is 100). Why did searches for “PV Sindhu caste” spike? Well, all searches related to PV Sindhu spiked. The graph for PV Sindhu spiked as did practically any keyword you could add to her name. For instance “PV Sindhu mother” shows a very similar spike.”
The argument Sanu makes is that the spike in searches were related to any keyword around Sindhu’s name. Therefore, typing “pv sindhu mother” or “pv sindhu family” would give similar results.
The News Minute article also writes that “there were more than 150,000 searches for her caste in June, and nearly 90,000 in July.”
Sanu counters this fact as well by stating that the interpretation of data from Google Adwords Keywords planner tool, in this case, is incorrect.
“The Keywords Planner tool gives search volumes for the entire set of “ideas” around your keyword. So there were not 150,000 search on “PV Sindhu caste” as TNM claims. This was for the entire idea space, including searches on just “PV Sindhu.” So how many searches for the exact phrase “PV Sindhu caste”? These were given just below (did they choose not to see?)“
According to the data culled out by Sanu, there were only 210 average monthly searches for “PV Sindhu caste”.
He elaborates further and writes that the figure of 150,000 people searching is a figure for people searching any idea around her name, not just caste.
“The June search they highlighted has about 150,000 for the entire related search space. Using the 10x relative ratio from Google Trends, about 2100 searches for “PV Sindhu caste” likely happened in August,” he writes.
Dhanya Rajendran, Editor-in-Chief of The News Minute immediately took to Twitter to apologise for the mistakes in the story.
The original story also contains a correction at the bottom now:
“Note: The article earlier carried erroneous numbers on the searches. We thank our faithful readers who pointed it out. TNM did not exercise its standard rigour and discipline when analysing AdWords data, and misread the July data. We regret the error, and apologize to our readers.”
The article Sanu has written is indicative of the larger problem which several journalists face when dealing with humongous amounts of data.
It’s also a lesson for the entire media fraternity to be careful with numbers, especially when basing strong arguments, in this case related to casteism in India, on data.
Having said that, the fact that even 210 people were searching about Sindhu’s caste is problematic. The numbers might have been read wrong, but they do reveal a mindset that still borders on finding a sportsperson’s caste. It takes away from celebrating his/her success.
Also, a lot of the time, data presented as part of Google analytics or trends can be full of jargon that makes it difficult for a person without any training in data journalism to grasp the exact implications.
What this has done, therefore, is to highlight the need to incorporate data journalism as a rigorous tool in training journalists.
Source: Indiafacts
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