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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America

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Top Candidates, the Science of Search and Time.com

February 09, 2007

Today Time.com published my second column for The Science of Search (In case you missed the first column on the 4 Day Diet you can find it here). For those of you that have been reading the Hitwise Intelligence blog you know that we've posted several charts on searches for potential presidential candidates.

In the Time column, we talked about how we can gain insight into political candidate brand association, using the appearence of "Muslim" in searches for Obama in the week following the story about his attendance of a Muslim school at the age of six. As candidates continue to lobby for their party's nomination we'll continue to report on candidate's brand strength and association.

After the column went live this morning I did get some questions from colleagues about the strength of queries for "joe biden" compared to the other candidates. To investigate I pulled the top candidate mentions from search terms driving traffic to the politics category (versus all categories) and found the following:

top political candidates.PNG

Interestingly enough Biden's name doesn't appear in this list. Diving into a search term analysis on Biden queries reveals that the majority of searches on "biden" aren't going to political websites but rather to News & Media sites (no doubt to read about his most recent gaffe). Also note the strength of Clinton's queries here when we look at 4 weeks of data versus the most recent data featured in the article.

Posted by Bill Tancer at 12:51 AM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Election2008