If Google Chose Our President
Posted by: grant in UncategorizedDigg Me!
Call it a slow day at the office, but I wondered out loud today how our four Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates are doing on google - which is to say, how much is being written about them and to what extent are people searching for them. Before I knew it, I was off gathering some crude ‘data’ just to see what, if any, trends emerged.
Candidate Related Content
My first question was how much information is out there about each candidate? How is it spread out across formats? To answer these two questions, I simply performed different types of searches in Google for each of the candidates/search terms and recorded the raw number of results in the table below.
So here are the raw #’s for search hits in Google:
| Search
Term |
Web Search | News Search** | Blog Search | Image Search |
| “Barack Obama” | 83,700,000 | 321,451 | 3,882,154 | 8,250,000 |
| “John McCain” | 64,300,000 | 343,804 | 2,928,493 | 4,410,000 |
| “Joe Biden”* | 35,900,000 | 75,719 | 509,411 | 567,400 |
| “Sarah Palin” | 172,000,000 | 184,334 | 487,247 | 4,870,000 |
Notes: All terms searched in Google between 3:20-3:50PM PST 10/09/2008
*Combined Total of Searches using “Joe Biden” & “Joseph Biden”
**News from last 30 days
So what does this all mean? Not much of course. However, I do think that one can safely say that there is a certain degree of Palin-mania taking place. Considering that she has only been on the national scene for a very short period, it is quite remarkable that she has earned more overall web search hits than the two presidential candidates combined.
Another possible trend: no one wants to see Joe Biden’s picture.
Most Searched Candidates
As for how popular searches are, click the graphic below to see how the candidates rate in search popularity. Once again, I think you will find that Palin-mania is real - and please, feel free to play with the numbers and inputs on this google page - I would love to hear your results!
