White People Stole My Car: Joke Search Still Popular Due To Racism Or Fact?

“White people stole my car” is still being Google searched after all these years. But are people still checking on this to see if it’s a joke, because a white dude did steal their car, or is it due to racism?

In a related report by The Inquisitr, way back in 2009 there were claims that if you searched for “white people stole my car,” then Google would ask, “Did you mean: black people stole my car.” There was even a photo being circulated around that purported to show this was the case.

At the time, it was speculated that someone purposefully misspelled “black people stole my car,” received the correction shown, and then altered the search text as a prank. It’s also possible that Google’s search engines really did mess up in a politically incorrect manner for a little while. After all, as I writer I often have to search for all sorts of “interesting” phrases, and I’ve seen some pretty weird auto-corrections and results. The oddest search result I ever recall was when I was researching something about video games and it asked me if I was looking for a topic related to rape. You have such a dirty mind, Google…

That’s all well and good, but why is searching for “white people stole my car” still so popular to this day? While the trend peaked in September of 2009, two years later the search was still around 21 percent of its high. Even in 2013, the search fluctuated between one to five percent, which is still a lot of searches. The original article by The Inquisitr also happens to be the top result on Google, and because of this, “white people stole my car” accounts for an amazing four percent of all our traffic according to Alexa.com. In contrast, searches for “black people stole my car” have also flat-lined since November of 2012.

Now most likely people are just checking up on this odd story even years after it first happened. But it’s also possible that vehicle theft statistics related to race have something to do with the matter. For example, in 2011, the FBI reported there were 50,092 arrests in total made for motor vehicle theft. The report split the demographics up into white, black, american Indian or Alaskan native, and Asian or pacific islander. There wasn’t a category for Hispanic, so presumably that was considered part of white. Now the percentage of black people stealing cars that year was 33.9 percent, so saying that white people stole my car is much more likely since 64 percent of all arrests were attributed to white people.

Since you found this article, why are people still Google searching for white people stole my car?