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Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

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Rudd, Howard and Obama: Domestic and International Online Political Mix

February 14, 2007

We've had an interesting week in terms of Australian politics, namely the opinion polls that have put the opposition leader, Kevin Rudd ahead of incumbent, John Howard as preferred prime minister, and the foray over Howard's criticism of US senator, Barack Obama's call to remove troops from Iraq.

The below chart indicates searches by Australian Internet users for both Australian and US political figures:

The first thing to note is the huge spike in searches for 'Kevin Rudd' in December 2006 when his leadership of the opposition was announced - search queries for Kevin Rudd have since stabilised to a level of interest on par with John Howard.

Secondly the chart indicates the level of Australian interest in the US Democratic primaries with searches for 'Hillary Clinton' and 'Barack Obama' surging in January 2007 as their nominations were announced.

Let's explore some of this search data further, firstly from a domestic standpoint. The below two tables indicate the websites that received traffic from 'Kevin Rudd' and 'John Howard' respectively.

To summarise the differences, we're seeing search terms for 'Kevin Rudd' more often being delivered to News and Media websites and blogs, while online users are typically landing at the Prime Minister's official homepage when they search for 'John Howard'.

It's interesting that visits to Wikipedia is common to searches for both politicians, while searches for 'Kevin Rudd' had a higher proportion of visits to the Parliament of Australia website than did 'John Howard'.