Politics and Elections Blog
Trends, tools and news from the Google Politics & Elections team
What search trends tell us about Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party
Thursday, October 27, 2011
When we launched our
Political Trendspotters Contest
last week, we heard from a number of users who wanted us to explore the trends around the Occupy Wall Street movement. After spending many days in the top 20 terms on
Google Trends
, we agreed that it would be useful to examine the dynamics of search queries in America related to OWS.
Across the American political spectrum, we have another grassroots movement that we can use for comparison purposes: the [Tea Party]. Based on search patterns from Google users, Americans' interest in these two large groups is clear.
Here’s what we found:
Searches for Occupy Wall Street started on Sept 16th & peaked one month later on October 15th
NY is tops in searches, right? Wrong. Top 3 states for most “Occupy” searches: Vermont, Oregon, New York
Search interest in OWS is higher than the Tea Party. Both currently and in looking at the birth of each
Searches for the Tea Party peak each April as Americans begin to file their taxes
The OWS movement saw its first spark of interest in search
on September 16th
. Two weeks later, interest across the United States spiked as Google users turned to the web to find out more about the group, peaking on October 15th. Recently, national search interest has receded, but Americans are still turning to the web to find out more information as the movement spreads out across the country — with the top 3 states being Vermont,
Oregon
, and New York.
Search interest for [Occupy Wall Street] jumped ahead of the [Tea Party] on
September 24
, and hasn’t looked back. In a historical context, when viewing the snapshot of their nascent birth, we can see the peak of [Occupy Wall Street]
has slightly more interest in American than searches for the [Tea Party] did during the groups peak in 2009
.
(One other interesting trend to call out from the chart below: search interest in the [Tea Party]
peaks each year in early April
— just as Americans are gathering their tax returns to file!)
But, what about media coverage? Despite big leads in polls and search traffic for Occupy Wall Street, it is almost in a dead heat with the Tea Party for the volume of news coverage. Using
Advanced Search in Google News
we found that between October 7 and last week,
Occupy Wall Street
only barely bests the
Tea Party
when we examine the number of news pieces covering each movement: 29,000 to 22,000.
We’ll be keeping an eye on the trends that are shaping the political landscape across the country.
If you spot one, let us know
. It might just be featured in our next post.
Posted by: Jake Parrillo, Google Politics & Elections Team
Calling all Google Political Trend Spotters
Monday, October 10, 2011
As the campaign season heats up, one of the ways our Politics & Elections team has begun to participate in the conversation is by highlighting some of the more interesting trends from our search data around candidates, issues, and campaigns. One example of a trend we spotted might explain why GOP Candidate Herman Cain is rising in the polls, while Texas Governor Rick Perry is dropping: four of the top 10 cities with the most searches for [Herman Cain] are major cities right in Texas.
According to Google Trends
, in all of 2011, Cain is rising fast in Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.
From an early look at the state of the GOP Presidential race in Iowa to looking at what users were searching for during our Fox News Debate last week, we’ve chronicled what voters are looking for on the web. Having access to useful political and issue information improves our democracy, and the team here at Google is always looking for more ways to help inform voters.
We’ll be visiting these type of trends over the next year, but we know that we can’t possibly spot them all. That’s why, we’re looking to you - the user - to help us find and discover interesting patterns and trends in search data.
Do you support a candidate in a race? Do you support an issue? Turn to our tools to show that you are part of a larger trend.
We’ll look to feature some of these user-submitted trends over the course of the next year right here on our blog.
Using our tools to spot trends is easy and fun. We encourage you to utilize our
Insights for Search
tool,
Google Trends
, the
Google Ngram Viewer
and even
Google Correlate
to discover and unearth interesting trends, patterns and connections. Once you find something interesting or newsworthy, drop it into the form below.
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Over the past decade, the web has consistently shown that it can help transform politics and elections from a passive process to an active, participatory one. Thousands of voters from all walks of life are using the web to stand up for a candidate or an issue and Google has begun to build tools to help voters find and share valuable information and create knowledge around issues.
But, we need your help to tell that story. We’ve demonstrated in the past that
these trends often can make compelling cases on campaigns
and election outcomes, but there’s more data that we can sift through ourselves.
Data is at the heart of much of what we do here at Google and we’re not the only ones who get excited about how data can be visualized in a compelling way.
Gregory Hubacek from Good Magazine created this beautiful visualization
of the data around our debate last month. This
infographic
and timeline show how the debate evolved over the course of the evening.
So, go get busy researching trends and insights via our tools and
submit them today
. We’ll feature as many of them as we can. In the meantime, stay tuned to the Politics & Elections Blog for trends and other data that can help frame up issues, races, and campaigns. November of 2012 will be here before you think!
Posted by: Jake Parrillo, Google Politics & Elections Team
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Calling All Google Politics Trendspotters!
Spot a political, issue or campaign search trend on the web that we should feature?
Submit Your Trends Here
