IQs and the Internet

Posted by knorby on November 26, 2008 under Python, google, internet | Be the First to Comment

After reading the comments on a story on reddit on IQs, I became curious about how IQs are reported on the internet. A few people were saying that when they see someone mention their IQ on the internet, it is usually above 130. The explanations given were along the lines of people lying, biased online tests, and segmentation in where people browse. I was curious what sort of frequencies the different IQs are mentioned, so I wrote up a little python to get the google search results for IQs 50-199 (I would have included lower values after seeing the result, but I choose to go the scraping route rather than gdata, which ends up getting you blocked by google, something I didn’t know). I ran the number with the word “iq”; I think there may be better queries, but simple seemed good enough. Here are the results, plotted with matplotlib:

I found these kind of surprising. Most of the result counts were around 6 million, but there were a few sharp drops. I was especially surprised by 100 and 130, since, if memory serves, 100 is the 50th-percentile for IQs and 130 is the 99th; I would expect a greater count on these two, since more sites would include those numbers while explaining the scale; instead, there are large drops. Weird. I don’t think there is any connection between these results and anything proposed on reddit either.

• See the raw dat file: IQ Google Search Results (DAT)