Microsoft Research Interactive Science


Forecasting Domestic Migration Using Search Queries


Roughly one in ten Americans move every year, bringing significant social and economic impact to both the places they move from and the places they move to.

Recently published research has shown that migration intent mined from internet search queries can forecast domestic migration and provide new insights beyond government data.

The interactive maps below is based on a sample of 4.2 million Bing search queries extracted between 2014 and 2016, where the query intent suggests an interest in moving from one place to another. Below, we display a migration score based on these queries showing the intensity of interest in migrating from one state to another.

 read the research paper



How do migration queries differ across states?

This pair of interactive maps show The animated arcs show the top 5 origin - destination pairs.

Click / tap on any state to change the origin or destination.
Or click / tap on these examples:

About

This is an interactive companion to the the 2019 Web Conference (WWW) paper "Forecasting U.S. Domestic Migration Using Internet Search Queries" by Allen Yilun Lin (Northwestern University), Justin Cranshaw (Microsoft Research), and Scott Counts (Microsoft Research).

This open-source interactive document was created by Matthew Brehmer in collaboration with Scott Counts and Justin Cranshaw in Spring / Summer 2019.

Learn more about the Microsoft Research Interactive Science project at msrinteractivescience.com .