If Uber, besides being the most funded on-demand economy company, is also the one which creates the fiercest controversy, we want to know what is the perception of Uber in those countries where it has real legal issues. Therefore, the Google autocomplete function seemed to be the most appropriate: it allows seeing what people search for the most after writing Uber on Google. This is our way to get how different is the point of view on Uber, from one country to another.
The main point of this protocol is how to navigate Google search in the most anonymous way: often anonymous navigation is not enough and you need tools that mask your real id. To bypass this problems, we used ”I Search From”. This website allows users to simulate the usage of Google Search from a different location or device. So that we could make one research with Google per each of the 26 countries where Uber has legal issues (see the Wikipedia article Legal status of Uber's service). And our query was always the same but written in the country’s language when possible: “Uber is “
We obtained a dataset containing four different autocompletes per each country, which were manually tagged in six different groups: autocompletes concerning legality (e.g.”uber is legal/illegal”), safety, quality, service (like “what is uber”), trending (“uber is down”) and others not relevant.
We felt it appropriate, in order to visualize the countries where Uber is being having legal controversies, to make this visualization as a world map. Each country here is colored according to the legal status of our super actor: legal and operative, or with legal issues, or banned at all. Above the map, we have represented the six groups of autocomplete. With Gephi we calculated nodes (groups) size, according to their importance. When you pass over one of these circles, all countries where people search that kind of information about Uber are highlighted.
Looking at the circles on the top, we can immediately notice that the most of people all around the world wants to know if Uber is legal or illegal where he lives. Secondly, they need information about what kind of service Uber is and whether it is worth using it. Fewer people needs to know if Uber is cheap (e.g. if it is cheaper than taxi service or not). “Trending” group collects those autocompletes related to events occurred tu Uber in a specific moment (e.g. malfunctioning of their platform or stock market trends).
