Description
From the representation we can guess Google's power in promoting its own companies has no significance in the search engines context. The panorama we see it's in a way similar to what came up in the first research phase: car and tech companies seem to dominate the scene, with Waymo driving in front of everyone, while we don't have as much presence of cities and states. Our definitive answer was that companies do come up a lot and they are major players on the scene.
Protocol
In our definition phase we also wanted to explore wich are the actors of the debate and how much they are talked about online. We picked Google News as our source of choice because it is a vaste collection of news from different sources and in this part we wanted to reduce the influence of how the topic is differently framed on newspapers, blogs, magazines to have a broader view. As Google itself it's one of the biggest players, if not the biggest, in the self-driving car game, we also used Yahoo News and Bing to check Google's bias into pushing it's own technology. We chose them as they are the three most used research engines according to the Alexa ranking. We scraped an overall of 150 articles, the first 50 articles from every source, and analyzed the corpus of the article through Voyant Tools, obtaining the number of times keywords were used. We then manually exstracted the number of times companies, cities, countries appearead inside the corpus and elaborated the data into the visualization in Illustrator.
Data
Timestamp: 01/12/2016 - 05/12/2016
Data source: Google News, Bing News, Yahoo News
Download data (4MB)
The dataset is an .xls file divided on different sheets. In the first sheet you'll find the final count of the number of times actors were quoted in the articles. The other sheets contains links & dates of the articles wich were analyzed to obtain the dataset.