What can Search Engines Tell Us About the 2008 Presidential Candidates?

According to Wordtracker, a tool that allows you to see how popular specific search engine "keywords" are, Hillary Clinton is the most searched for in the major search engines such as Google & Yahoo Search, with Barack Obama coming in at a close 2nd place.

Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama are searched for more than 3 times more often than any of the Republican candidates, Wordtracker reports.

The question is, what can these keyword stats tell us about the current political climate in regards to the 2008 race for the White House? Can it give us any insight into who each party may nominate to run for them in 2008, or possibly which candidates will pair up and run together?

It seems, at least today, that Hillary Clinton would easily win the election if search engine queries played a part in our electoral process. And, if Hillary were bold enough, she'd choose Barack Obama as her running mate based on these stats as well.

While there aren't really any suprises on the Democratic side, there is one striking suprise on the Republican side, with Ron Paul being the 3rd most searched for in the major search engines, ahead of Rudy Giuliani.

Here are the search engine stats according to Wordtracker:



*Represents candidates where two first names are common when speaking about them, so their respective keywords were added together (joe biden 411 + joseph biden 78 = 489) and (chris dodd 175 + christopher dodd 62 = 237) -- If a candidates' alternate first name did not have at least a '15' Predict number in Wordtracker, it was not added together with the more common first name.

To understand what the Wordtracker "Predict" number encompasses, click here.