On Google, OWS Beats The Tea Party
Posted by: Mark Gimein on October 28, 2011 at 12:05 PM
It’s well known that Google knows a whole lot about us, but less known that they’re pretty good about letting us know what they know. Bloomberg News reporter Esmé E. Deprez,* who’s based at City Hall and has been covering OWS, tipped us off to some good data on Google’s politics and election blog that highlights data from Google’s trends tool.
The data show searches for “Occupy Wall Street” skyrocketing in a month, rising from nowhere to reach more than five times the search interest in the Tea Party. The blog notes that in the same period the press was still only a little more likely to write about OWS. Google’s Jake Parillo wants to tease out the implication that the Tea Party is over-covered.
Maybe. The blog also carefully notes that a disproportionate number of the searches on “Occupy Wall Street” come from Vermont and Oregon—a result so comically predictable that it’s unexpected. So it might be that the search numbers don’t really reflect the interest of the readers. Or they can indicate an interest that’s peaking. Or maybe they are a leading indicator of press interest. It’s hard to decide, but still interesting to speculate.
(Screenshot by the Google Politics and Election Blog)
Correction: Esmé E. Deprez’s last name was misspelled in an earlier version of this post. A sincere apology, Esmé!
