New election tool. Google Trends....

[Joanne98]

Case Study: Predicting Election Results
In order to determine what kind of applications Google Trends may have to politics, I decided to compare the Republican candidates' last names for the 2008 primary season, and see how the Google search volume corresponds to voting behavior. After all, if someone is going to vote for a candidate, it's very likely that he or she will Google the candidate beforehand to learn more about the candidate's platform.

For many states, data is either not available at all or available only for some candidates.

Overall, the Democratic primaries were much, much easier to predict than the Republican ones. We hypothesized that this had something to do with the Democratic race having consistently been a much tighter, more competitive one. However, demographic differences between Republican and Democratic voters may also play a role, but the extent to which they affect Google Trends results has yet to be determined.

Democratic Primaries
Look what happens when we try to compare Obama and Hillary in the US across all subregions for the current year:

http://michaelg.us/freakon/googletrends.php

[anigbrowl]

1. New? Bummer...I should have gone into print with it.

I've been using this since it was introduced but I assumed if I posted about how useful it seems I'd get trashed for the technological equivalent of reading tealeaves.