Limerick is ... a failed society: what Google auto-complete thinks of Irish towns

Donegal's in Northern Ireland, no-one knows where Drogheda is, God incarnated himself  as Galway, and Ennis is fat.

Gavyn Conlon started noticing some odd trends when he let Google's auto-complete guess what the rest of his search terms were for different towns and cities. The results were a little ... interesting, so he plotted some of them on a map!

Google's suggestions are based on what people actually search for, so these are all genuine queries. 'The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all web users and the content of web pages indexed by Google,' the search engine explains on its help pages.

So lots of people are curious about the southern counties, but apparently are not fans of Longford, Dundalk, or Dublin. Oh well.

Thanks to Gavyn for letting us use his map.