Examining Presidential Candidates Via Google Trends 119
Michael Giuffrida writes "Google Trends is a free application produced by Google that shows how often a given keyword is searched for, over time. After seeing how candidates in the 2008 primaries have done in Google Trends in different states, it's clear that this tool can be very useful for campaigns." Read on below for some of the specifics about how these candidates have fared, Google-wise.
"For example, in New Hampshire, in the days leading up to the Jan. 8 primary, Clinton was searched for the most, followed by Obama, followed by Edwards — which was how the primary results turned out. In other words, the candidates most searched for on Google by users in New Hampshire were also the candidates with the most number of votes. This works for many other states as well.For the first 37 Democratic primaries and caucuses, 32 states had enough data on Google to make a prediction. This method correctly predicted 27 of those 32 sates. Predictions aside, the tool is also useful simply in finding out how popular a candidate is in different states, assuming that the more popular candidates are entered more often as a search term in Google (an assumption that was verified, at least for the Democratic primaries, by the positive association found)."
Mention Pigeons more (Score:5, Funny)
27 out of 32 (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is Ron Paul? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Where is Ron Paul? (Score:4, Insightful)
If anything, those trends didn't equate to votes which also means that this article is nothing more than a fluff piece and not to be taken seriously.
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If a candidate is equally liked by fanboys AND media, G-trends accurately reflects the public polls. (e.g. BHO)
If a candidate is liked by fanboys but hated by media (i.e. media blackout), G-trends fails to predict global outcome.
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All the search trends need to indicate the context of the search and group the results by context in order to provide any meaning to the results.
Negative searches can in now way be used to indicate popularity in fact it would definitely indicate the opposite. Google trends is mo
Re:Where is Ron Paul? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words... their examination works great, except when it doesn't. And in that case, we'll just not included that data in the final results.
Wish I could've gotten away with that in college.
Because it screws up their predictions? (Score:3, Insightful)
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As opposed to one the current candidates that seems to have NO solid issues to base his run for president on?
I'll leave it to you to figure who I'm speaking about.
Re:Where is Ron Paul? (Score:4, Insightful)
Eventually it will get off the front pages and your blather will seem, as usual, insubstantial. But as soon as words like "candidate" and "president" start to come into your post, your an expert."
What makes you think it stops at the election? It keeps going just as strong after that. Politics is what makes ours (and most other) countries tick...everyone should keep their ears and eyes open to what our elected ones are doing....and constantly try to evaluate them as to their performance, and see if they need to be replaced the next cycle.
There are always elections going on...Representatives, Senators, Governors, local councils, judges, police...DA's...Sheriffs...etc.
It isn't like we only have things up for a vote every 4 years...there are multiple times to vote on a number of offices and issues locally and nationally every year.
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Ron Paul was not a serious candidate at any stage of the campaign
Not even enough to the fact he raised more money debt free and free from PAC than any other GOP candidate and broke 2 fundraising day records?
Giuliani was leading in polls before the primaries
Giuliani had Roger Ailes support in the media, no other candidate had that level of media support. Oprah's support of Obama didn't even match what Murdoch Media did for Guiliani.
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And now, what everyone's been wondering.. http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22john+mccain%22%2C+%22barak+obama%22&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 [google.com] four more years?
No, the problem is you spelled "barack" wrong. http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22john+mccain%22%2C+%22barack+obama%22&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 [google.com] change we can believe in?
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Re:27 out of 32 (Score:5, Interesting)
I think if you want to predict the presidential winner, you should go with the tried and true method....see which candidates halloween mask sells the most!! That has been an accurate predictor for decades now....It appears at least so far, now that they are tracking the masks throughout the primary season too, that Obama has the lead in the mask poll [topix.net] .
I dunno...at this point, I figure dressing up as Obama or McCain would be equally as scary to most of us....
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Founded in 1999...
I think maybe the parent was going for a Funny mod
These last two Presidential elections were anything but normal.
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Weekly Reader Poll (Score:4, Interesting)
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Maybe I'm being too cruel to the children, when I was a kid I wouldn't have liked my opinions demeaned, but I also know that when I was a kid in American schools I was never given an appreciation for the suffering that military adventure
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However, if I remember my childhood accurately, I'd have to say that I and my classmates almost always advocated the candidates for whom our parents were planning to vote. Perhaps that's what lends it some accuracy - the kids are basically stating a preference on behal
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For instance, younger - me decided to hope that Clinton would win the 1996 election, while much later I learned my dad had voted for Perot.
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So if Ron Paul released a Halloween mask, he would be our next president?
Also, I could see a crap storm happen with an Obama Halloween mask. Seriously, that could go in so many directions of political correctness that it makes my head hurt.
In case anyone looks at the pretty graphs... (Score:3, Interesting)
"For the Republican Primaries, last names could easily be used. Ron Paul was excluded. His last name is too common. Using his full name is not a good solution either, because he had massive popularity on the Internet, becoming a meme of sorts, which did not at all correspond with his actual successes (or lack thereof) in the primaries."
Re:In case anyone looks at the pretty graphs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In case anyone looks at the pretty graphs... (Score:5, Insightful)
They're using a candidate's popularity in Google Trends as a measurement of the success of their campaign.
For Ron Paul, his popularity on the internet has nothing to do with his real-life political success - as grandparent poster said, he's an internet meme. You think there's any correlation between "Ron Paul" jokes on forums and genuine interest in his campaign?
Their "hypothesis" for the other candidates Google trends measures the success of their campaign. With Ron Paul, it's measuring something else entirely.
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In other words, popularity on Google indicates popularity on Google. While I can't argue with the truth of that statement, I can quibble with its usefulness...
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Re:In case anyone looks at the pretty graphs... (Score:4, Insightful)
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On another note, listening to some of Ron Paul's speeches, he doesn't seem to have expected a realistic chance of winning the presidency. His campaign from early on seems to have been focussed on getting his message out and attempting to reform the republican party by packing it with libertarians. I will be inte
Re:In case anyone looks at the pretty graphs... (Score:4, Insightful)
There are such things as statistical outliers and externalities.
They're not talking about "zomg google popularity means they'll win!" They're saying, "Watch for your search graphs to spike after a speech to see if it was effective."
Contrived example: Barack Obama makes a big speech about social security. If, suddenly, the number of searches for "Barack Obama Social Security" spikes, you could conclude that maybe you reached some people, generated some interest.
Now, boys and girls, this is where we stop and think. This would work for Barack Obama because those searches track well with the speech he made. It would not work for Ron Paul given his status as an internet meme. The correlation between Ron Paul searches and events in his campaign is going to be just as weak as correlations between Chuck Norris and (actual) events in his life, or between lolcats and pet food product safety.
I don't know how to make it any clearer. There is no "hypothesis." They have not framed this a statistical H0: Google doesn't control the elections and calculated a p-value. They haven't ignored data that would disprove some part of string theory. They're just saying this:
Tracking search trends can be interesting for candidates. Less so for Ron Paul.
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Never mind - as I read the rest of the FA, they are trying to predict elections.
^.^
But still, my point stands - they point out that this isn't useful for Ron Paul, because interest in Ron Paul on the internet has little to do with his actual campaign. But, nobody as the same Chuck Norris-like admiration of Hillary, so her results are related to campaigns.
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You're setting the bar pretty low for "reasoned and mature." But, as some people don't seem to realize, controlling for confounding variables makes statistical work more accurate, not less.
But, that things seem to track more or less is pretty nifty. The next step would be to actually automate the predictions, and with curiousity piqued, I Googled (naturally) for a Google Trends API. They've been promising one [cnet.com] since 2007, but evidently it hasn't shown up yet or was cancelled, which is disappointing.
It
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You're setting the bar pretty low for "reasoned and mature."
Ouch.
But, that things seem to track more or less is pretty nifty. The next step would be to actually automate the predictions...
No API, but you could hard-code a script to run the searches (really, all you need is a url to the image itself [google.com]) and programmatically look at the trend line to find the index numbers/compare the candidates. Then you'd have a whole bunch of nice happy numbers, and you could control and find significance of and pivot allll you want.
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Nah, just that most of my posts are knee-jerk rants. But, it's nice for my posts to be confused with something worth reading every once in a while. ^.^
But, there's no labels on the y-axis. Google seems to have made the trends information purposefully difficult to use. I suppose you could make relative comparisons, but then only if everything you wanted to compare was on the same graph - otherwise, the y-axis might be different.
Don't get me wrong - I think this is a really cool project. I never thou
Re:In case anyone looks at the pretty graphs... (Score:4, Insightful)
By including Ron Paul but at least being complete and honest, the analysis would have been more worthwhile than what it now is -- a pile of rubbish.
We are doomed! (Score:1)
On the other hand, if you look for trends in "games", the trend is steadily upward.
We are doomed! (Score:1)
On the other hand, "games" on the increase, with "facebook" showing exponential growth.
Watch as billions of facebook users heat up the planet.
Not the whole story (Score:3, Interesting)
Still, one would expect logically that interest in a candidate is related to their poll numbers. But you need a better way to distinguish between negative interest and positive interest: how many people are searching "Obama AND Wright video" vs "Obama AND race speech"? With a more detailed model they could be on to something.
Re:Not the whole story (Score:5, Informative)
As an example, look at the Google Trends data with Ron Paul included [google.com]. Searches for Ron Paul were higher than for Obama in early January, yet he was never higher than 4th (3rd?) in the Republican caucuses/primaries. His popularity was on the Internet alone.
Re:Not the whole story (Score:5, Informative)
Paul got 2nd in NV, after Romney. The NV state GOP convention was recessed indefinitely after it looked like Paul would get a majority of delegates and has yet to be reconvened. There are 2 competing conventions [politickernv.com] planned to finish the selection. The established GOP doesn't seem to like Paul very much.
I find it amusing that as this year had such a huge turnout of primary voters it just made more problems for the 'old guard' in both camps. Maybe if even more Americans bothered with being involved we'd get something other than the continued Washington Payola cruft.
Dewey defeats Truman (Score:1)
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and were in many cases followed by
"This guy's absolutely crazy"
Although he was an appealing candidate on the surface (Fiscally conservative, against Iraq, etc....), once you dug a little deeper, there were many things about him that didn't sit well with most voters (He literally voted against everything that crossed his desk, and was tied to some pretty scary people in the 90s)
Had a more reasonable cand
Re:Not the whole story (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.google.com/trends?q=clinton%2C+evil&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 [google.com]
Old farts (Score:5, Insightful)
The sample: folks on the internet.
Who's missing: folks who aren't on the internet; like old farts, poor people and Amish. As far as the old farts are concerned: they are the most well organized and the most vocal political group in this country. I think these charts reflect nothing.
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OK, so they reflect trends on the internet and folks who are active on the internet: nothing else.
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OK, so they reflect trends on the internet and folks who are active on the internet: nothing else.
Exactly. The author states several times that this ONLY looks at a small subset of the population, that this is NOT a proper statistical analysis. Oh, wait, this is
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You know what? I read TFA a few times. There is just vague references for not drawing conclusions, in other words; just CYA. They do not say anything specific. So, don't get all sanctimonious with me about reading the fucking article.
Oh wait... (Score:1, Troll)
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You read the article. Good for you.
In my statement,"Oh, wait, this is
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This is neither a majority nor a representative sample. I do predict an overwhelming victory for Obama according to those polls, even though I am almost certain McCain is going to win the election.
I'm an old-ish fart and I'd never vote for him (Score:2)
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As a friend of mine put it in resignation, no matter if Clinton or Obama, McCain is gonna win. Simply because Clinton is not man enough and Obama not white enough to be prez.
I hate to say it, but I guess that's how it's gonna be.
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What's voter mobilization as for as "poor people" and "Amish" are concerned? Since anecdote == data, my grandparents get some of their news on the internet, and I would suspect that some old farts might influence/be influenced by those un-old-farts doing the searching.
It's not a proper random sample, and it suffers from response bias. But with a near 90% success rate, I wonder how it compares to exit polls and the like.
Also, the elderly are more likely to vote, but census data since they're outnumbere
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I think these charts reflect nothing.
Only if you read the charts at face value. Instead of trying to interpret messy search volume data, ask what the charts, considered together instead of individually, say about the circumstances which generated the data.
While you can't draw any hard statistical conclusions due to heavy sampling bias (which TFA acknowledges), you can make some interesting observations.
Here's what I notice. The models worked pretty well for the Democratic primaries, but hardly predicted anything about the Republican primari
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What about the poor? (Score:3, Insightful)
ridiculous statistical flaws (Score:4, Insightful)
However, he makes no mention of the fact that "Obama" and "Hillary" are the most popularly used terms to refer to the candidates. Almost all candidates are refferred to primarily by their last names. Hilary is a special case where we use her first name because her husband was so recently president.
His use of "Barack" and "Hilary" is about as statistically accurate as using "Barack" and "Rodham". Fortunatly, this inaccuracy is obviously visible in his numbers, because using his first-name method it quickly looks like Edwards might be a write-in candidate to rival them both.
Please slashdot, stop posting braindead stories.
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The popularity of Hillary Clinton's first name is a little simpler. Her campaign has actively encouraged use of her first name ("Hillary 2008"). This is certainly to differentiate her from her husband, but there ar
Cherrypicking the data to reach false conclusions (Score:5, Insightful)
So, in other words, any data that contradicts the hypothesis will be thrown out.
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Re:Cherrypicking the data to reach false conclusio (Score:2)
That is to say, Ron Paul was a consuming cult that was able to organize a massive, yet still a niche, support grou
I Know It's Not Statistically Valid. (Score:5, Insightful)
What the choice of candidates tell me (Score:2)
Most of the time conspiracy theorists sound whacko to me but sometimes they sure sound like they have a little insight most people are not aware of.
If Google search numubers predict who will win... (Score:5, Funny)
Does this mean that the next President of the United States will be Tila Tequila?
If that happens... (Score:1)
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I did, in fact, do some research [tnr.com]. :)
Had it been one article, I could buy that, but we're talking _years_ worth of racist venom in his newsletter. There wasn't a flood, but there was a steady enough stream that even the most laissez faire (rim shot) editor should have noticed it.
And something from Anti War Radio and Prison Planet? Come on, there's got to be better material in his defense out there. At the risk of engaging in the ad hominem fallacy, that station is largely populated by complete lunatic
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paris hilton! (Score:5, Funny)
Global Warming vs. Paris Hilton [google.com]
Global Warming vs. Iraq [google.com]
(ignore the bottom chart, it is irrelevant to my study)
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When you compare it to other things like Facebook or Google you realize how insanely small the percentage of Slashdot readers must be.
No Y axis label makes this basically useless (Score:2)
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