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Comment by alanctgardner2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why they bother putting 'Mystery' in the headline.

http://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=obama,%20romney

Surprise, the incumbent president is far more popular than the challenger, in terms of historic searches. There's no mystery, this is somewhere between a fluff political piece and an advertisement for Google's new search tech.

Come on WSJ, you can do better.

edit: A bigger mystery; does anyone know why these searches are more popular in Africa than the United States? The top five countries for Obama searches are:

1) Burundi 2) Guinea 3) Rwanda 4) Sierra Leone 5) United States

Meanwhile, Romney is pretty much only relevant in the US.

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That's actually not true. Here's the past 90 days in the US for Obama (blue), Romney (red) and taxes (yellow): http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama,+romney,+taxes&...

If you restrict to just US news searches (as many of the inserted results are newsy), it is similar: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney%2C%...

Actually a lot of election-related queries, most of which searched less than Romney and Obama transform results in this manner, e.g. social security, health care, abortion, taxes, ohio, election and many others. Just not Romney: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=romney%2C%20social%20...

I'm not sure if I follow the second part. Adding more comma-separated words doesn't do anything to the other lines, this is just an overlay of multiple graphs. Adding or removing 'taxes' doesn't do anything.

Sorry for not being clear (was also trying to not be verbose!). All it shows is that all those terms were searched a lot less than Romney for the past 90 days, and yet they all were found to alter subsequent search results after searching them (unlike Romney).

In a similar vein. Here is the trend with the addition of the candidates in the previous 2 elections:

http://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney%2C%2...

It will be interesting to see if Obama wins. If he does then winning in Google Trends will predict winning in the election.

Regarding popularity by country: I don't know, but I would speculate that decreased access in Burundi, Guinea, etc. means they don't use the internet for mundane stuff... shopping or looking at cats.

Thus Obama may constitute a larger proportion of searches in those places than in the US.

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