This is the end of an era, to say the least. George W. Bush has been a polarizing force in this county and his mere presence during these crisis-fraught years will probably prove to be an endless source of controversy. To bring a sense of closure to this administration and document the mix of emotions as we say goodbye, a new site named Goodbye.us has been launched to capture the mood of the nation in the form of an open letter. While this site is still in the beginning phases, the obvious hope is that there will be an outpouring of emotion to document, and maybe even present to President Bush. Think of it as a national time capsule of the era. So please, take a look and if you have something to say to Mr. Bush, share!
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From the publishers of ‘leaving nothing to the imagination’ comes this classy tome:
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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!
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Say that five times fast and then imagine my surprise when my little Sarah Palin article got such an immediate response, and in the form of an advertisement no less! (see comment #1 in Sarah Palin’s Big Book Deal ).
Unbeknownst to me, there will soon be a ‘tell-all’ book entitled “Sarah Takes on Big Oil” hitting the stands. Boy, gosh, do I ever know about it now. The advertising wing of the publisher was kind enough to correct my oversight and plug the book in a comment.
What I found interesting is that this book is being published by none other than a group called 108 Petroleum Newspapers of Alaska, a division of PNA publishing (Petroleum Newspapers of Alaska).
My question to the blogoshpere: is this as bad as it sounds? Is this the Petroleum Industry rewriting history to give a Green tint to a vice presidential candidate? All comments and/or information welcome!
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It could hardly escape our notice here at Realbook.com that where Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin goes, the printed page follows. Other than the enormous amount of ink spilled on Palin every day in the media, there have already been the obligatory instant biographies soon to hit the shelves.
Today we learn that infamous Palin satirist Tina Fey has landed a book deal at a healthy $5-6 million. Naturally the buzz about this is that Fey’s excellent Palin impression had much to do with this deal (never mind that she has been a well respected rising star for years now).
All of this just makes us wonder how soon we can expect to hear of a book deal for Palin herself. Obviouly, a McCain/Palin loss would be much more likely to produce such a deal much much sooner. But we wonder what would Palin the author sound like - we can only hope that the widely spread Palin-doodles are no preview.
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