The Election via Google

This time of year it’s hard to avoid the latest most up-to-date polling numbers telling you which political candidate is winning or which party is in the lead. We’ve got political pundits coming out of the wood-work and each one of them has a different take on the whole thing.

Rather than relying on the latest polling data of the undecided voters (has anyone ever met one of these people by the way? I’m not sure they actually exist) I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the election through the eyes of a search engine, namely Google.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to start spouting off my political opinion or interpretation of my findings (you probably get enough of that if you follow me on Twitter). I’m going to go strictly FoxNews on this one (I report, you decide).

The Numbers

The first and most natural comparison is just a simple search for the candidates names:

• A search for Obama returns 201 million results.
• A search for McCain returns 140 million results.

Since the pure number of results doesn’t really give us an indicator of the sentiment of those results, I decided to see who Google thought would win the election and actually become President.

• A search for President McCain returned 11.8 million results.
• A search for President Obama returned 19.9 million results.

Up next is a search that as in golf, you’re shooting for the lower total…

• A search for McCain lies returned 17 million results.
• A search for Obama lies returned 11.6 million results.

Experience (or in this case inexperience) has been a topic of discussion for supporters of both major candidates. What did Google have to say about it?

• A search for Obama inexperience returned 947,000 results.
• A search for McCain inexperience returned 839,000 results.
• Also of note, a search for Palin inexperience returned 647,000 results.

The Media

Another popular talking point is that the media has been biased for one cadidate or the other depending on which station or publication you’re talking about. To help investigate those claims I made use of the handy “site:” searches combined with the candidates names to figure out who was covered most.

• A search for Obama site: cnn.com returned 272,000 results.
• The same search for McCain (McCain site: cnn.com) returned 222,000 results.

• McCain site:foxnews.com returned 712,000 results.
• Obama site:foxnews.com returned 785,000 results.

• Obama site:cbsnews.com returned 125,000 results.
• McCain site:cbsnews.com returned 111,000 results.

• Obama site:rushlimbaugh.com returned 1,930 results.
• McCain site:rushlimbaugh.com returned 1,470 results.

• McCain site:rnc.org returned 891 results.
• Obama site:rnc.org returned 514 results.

• Obama site:democrats.org returned 148,000 results.
• McCain site:democrats.org returned 37,900 results.

So what do all these numbers say? You tell me! Weigh in with your opinion in a comment below.