Kim Hoang Nguyen was intrigued when she stumbled across Todd William Schneider online. Not because Mr. Schneider, a Yale graduateroyal circle club, screamed marriage material, but rather because of the comprehensive data he collected on a subject she was interested in (according to which, Ivy League graduates were once heavily featured).

“I love your work,” Ms. Nguyen said in an email, referring to his search engine, weddingcrunchers.com.

But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.

His debunked claims about Haitian migrants stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio, helped stir a firestorm over immigration in that community,todaybet which has dealt with bomb threats and evacuations after Mr. Trump made his comments.

She was trying to create a similar one to research wedding trends for a story pitch as a freelance writer, and wondered what compelled his work.

In 2013, Mr. Schneider built the search engine on a lark in two weeks, and scraped data from traditional wedding announcements featured in The New York Times from 1981 to 2020 — when traditional announcements became the more narrative Mini-Vows — and analyzed it in a wry, cynical way on his website. (The site is not affiliated with The Times.)

Among his takeaways: “There used to be more Republicans than Democrats cited; over the years there were fewer mentions of preppy boarding schools; and the words ‘hedge fund’ overtook ‘investment bank.’”

“I tracked words and phrases, college names, company names, ages,” said Mr. Schneider, 41, who graduated summa cum laude from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and electrical engineering. He is a founder and the chief technology officer of Poppy Legal, a legal expense management platform start-up company.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.royal circle club