Graphs are fun

So Google has a fun time killer (among others) called Google Trends.

Using the tool you can compare various searches over the past 30 days (or several years), and to only Canadian searches.  So what do we get if we look at the election (excluding the Bloc, because no one outside Quebec should give a damn about anyways?

First, let’s compare search frequencies of the party leaders:

Here we notice that Stephen Harper is pretty popular.  Elizabeth may dropped from people’s concerns after she got into the leaders debate, and Jack Layton is more popular than Stephane Dion.

So what about the parties?

Now we notice that the Conservative’s are less popular than the Liberals.  I guess people only care about Harper, and not really about his party (remember, searches aren’t always for good reasons).  We can also see that the Liberals had a large lead, but have lost it over time.  Again, the Green Party was really popular when they weren’t allowed to debate, but once that dropped, everyone stopped caring.  Finally, we notice that in the past three days, people are actually starting to care about the election a bit more, or else they didn’t care about the election over the weekend.

So go play with Google Trends, and see what you can do.  I’ll try to remember to run this again nearer to the election date for comparison.

I should note also, that unfortunately Google doesn’t get enough data to trend searches like “Linda Duncan” versus “Rahim Jaffer”, so I can’t make better breakdowns like that.

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3 thoughts on “Graphs are fun”

  1. thoughtcounts Z says:

    Google Trends is awesome. As far as its political implications go, though, I wonder what searches really mean. I know when I search for information about candidates it’s usually the ones I don’t plan to vote for, because I’m already familiar with most of the available information about the candidates I support, and I’m just looking to verify something I heard or something I’m trying to explain about their opponents. I’m sure I’m not a typical internet user, though. At any rate, I’d say that high search volume is definitely related to prominence in the news and name recognition, but I’m unsure how much it indicates popularity. I’m curious what you think.

    Reply
    1. Ian says:

      Oh yeah, definitely. Google trends tells us about as much about election day as poll data does (with our current system). Especially consider the (smaller in Canada) number of people without internet access.

      It’s definitely interesting though.

      Reply
  2. James Bell says:

    I agree with thoughtcounts Z.
    Maybe a candidate gets searched more because he’s very bad at stating his position, so everyone has to go online to find out what he really means.
    Maybe a party has less descriptive advertising in other mediums, so people resort to the internet for those parties.
    And people who are really interested in only one specific party are likely to have that party’s page bookmarked, and use Google for the other parties.

    Reply

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