::As I've said, the numbers that Google gives you are misleading. You have to click through to the last page of results to see the true figure. In the case of Joplin, there's actually 202 results for "Joplin metropolitan area" and 132 for "Joplin, Missouri metropolitan area". And that's web results, which aren't terribly helpful given the number of Wikipedia mirrors. Google Books gives me ten legitimate results (minus books scraped from WP) for Joplin, and three legitimate results for Joplin, Missouri. Google News: 23 for Joplin, 0 for Joplin, Missouri. I can't be bothered doing this for Elmira as well, but I bet it would follow the same pattern.