How Google Searches Pretty Much Nailed the New Hampshire Primary – Bloomberg
Google’s ability to look into the future of political contests just notched another win: New Hampshire.
Searches of presidential candidates conducted by Google users in New Hampshire on Feb. 9 corresponded closely with the voting results of the state’s primary. The top-searched Democratic candidate was Bernie Sanders, who won with 60 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, according to the Associated Press. He got 72 percent of the searches, according to Google, while Hillary Clinton got 28 percent of the queries and 38 percent of the vote.
From: How Google Searches Pretty Much Nailed the New Hampshire Primary – Bloomberg Business
I mean, this is way too post-hoc. Yeah, search frequency tells us something. Obviously. But would you bet on that variable alone?Report
Well, there’s not much argument about correlation here. It’s mostly answering the question that was asked extensively in the runup to the election as everyone was looking at the numbers: Is this indicative of anything? People were arguing about it.
Turns out that there appears to be a relationship. At least in New Hampshire. Something tells me we’re going to know a lot about it as time goes on.
Then it’s going to become useless because the campaigns will skew the results with bots.Report
Then it’s going to become useless because the campaigns will skew the results with bots.
What makes this (inevitable) result so frustrating is that it obscures information that would otherwise be useful.
But, I suppose, information that is more useful to the 1st place person than the 3rd place person is information that Thirdy would want to keep out of Firsty’s hands…Report
Ten’ll get you 100 that someone’s already got something better than google searches to poll the internet. (In fact, my wager is that I know the guy who wrote it).
Betcha you could do something nice pulling data off Facebook or Twitter.
[legal? don’t ask me about legal]Report
Twitter would be easy. FB more difficult, cuz privacy settings. But still, this tells you something, and maybe more than landline polls, but all the same, a bunch of Tumblerites posting stuff doesn’t tell you who will get to the polls nor what they’ll do when they get there.
I’ll probably vote for Clinton, but I don’t really post much about it cuz I don’t want to listen to all my Sanders-friends. So.Report
The trolls I know are waaay more likely to hack in the back end of something, than to pay attention to privacy settings.
… they’re really not the sort of people you want to pick fights with.Report
I suspect unfettered access to FB data is very non-trivial. Likewise, there is a ton of obvious selection bias in scraping the “public” posts.
In any case, this is a lot of data, and one can control for the bias in various ways. But just “raw search count” is not the right way.Report
I got to think Governor Carcetti’s vote totals way underperformed his Google analytics.Report