You don’t want to be caught wearing the same Harley Quinn costume as the rest of America–and thankfully, Google is using Big Data to help you avoid it.
Google’s Frightgeist map ranks costume popularity based on searches and by location. You can scroll around the interactive map, landing on the info that the top costume in Eureka, CA is Harley’s galpal Poison Ivy, while in Alpena, MI it’s mother of dragons Daenerys Targaryen.
Of course, these results are rooted in search data, so there’s no guarantee they’ll be people’s final costume choices. It also seems like the map is choosing certain towns to highlight based on however it’s parsing search data, so it isn’t a perfect representation of the whole country. But it’s fun to explore the country’s Frightgeist and the trending clusters may save you from buying the same costume as the rest of your town.
The map has a tab to rank national costume trends, too: Currently DC Comics’ beloved and deranged villain Harley Quinn is #1, followed by Star Wars and Superheroes. You can also search for your costume of choice to see how popular it is and your projected chances of running into another person similarly clothed at a party. Or you can choose to be shown a less popular costume search.
Or, like me, you can search for an idea and be amazed that it is not trending in the U.S.A.
[Frightgeist Map via VentureBeat]
Top image via Comics Alliance