The statisticians over at FiveThirtyEight are at it again, so which major California City is most often forgotten?
Sorry San Jose, but it is you. (Full disclosure: Nobody at CityNews forgets about SJ)
538 cites online quiz data from Sporcle, a website that hosts numerous quizzes such as naming the 100 most populous cities in the US, as well as Google search data. The data cited demonstrates that while San Jose is the 10th most populous city in the country, search interest ranks San Jose 42nd which lands between Louisville, Kentucky and Omaha, Nebraska.
For the quiz data, the top 10 most-frequently remembered cities appear on over 85% of responses, San Diego, #8 in population is recalled 88.7% of the time. San Jose, however, is only recalled 67.2% of the time.
538 delves into why this is, pointing to San Francisco overshadowing San Jose on a variety of aspects like tourism and the possibility of east coast bias present in the data, as east coast cities more frequently outperform their populations.
But with stronger numbers on lists about job growth, patents, and future readiness, does it matter how much someone on the east coast remembers San Jose? Sounds like SJ can just sit tight, not worry about a bunch of pesky tourists, and watch the future arrive.
Now if only the Sharks could win a championship for the city too.
More on San Jose not getting their due can be found here.
Image Credit: Flickr User Thomas Hawk, https://flic.kr/p/gD8iR via (CC BY-NC 2.0)