Google Insights into Canadian Election Searches Continued

This post is a continuation of my earlier posts (here and here) on using Google Insights to look into Google’s data on searches for Canadian political parties and leaders during this election season. Although I have many qualms about the use of this data and how generalizable it is, I am so far impressed with how well it syncs with the general zeitgeist about the ebb and flow of party popularity (although I havn’t figured out how to quantify that relationship yet — possibly by indexing the data from Google with polling data?). Obviously the population of Canadians using the internet — specifically Google — to search for political parties and leaders is not exactly the same as the voting population, and searches are not in themselves an indication of which party’s candidate someone is going to vote for. I do think it is interesting, however, how the search data correlates with some general shifts during this election, including the bump the green party got during the debate controversy and now the rise of the NDP as a serious contender, or at least a possible Liberal spoiler, in this election.

Today’s data follows the same format and configuration as my other two post:

The Set Up

The Search Terms and Filters are very important when using Google Insight. As I found in my initial post “Searches for Canadian Political Parties and Leaders: Google Insights Data” it was very important to include specific search terms people might use, while excluding search terms which brought in extraneous data. The search terms I constructed were based on ballancing these two concerns. As before, I am including data from all of Canada’s regions and from the past 30 days.

The Interest Over Time graph:

Interest Over Time

A couple things of interest here. One is that the green party post-debate controversy bump has continued, and the total frequency of searches for the green party and their leader have only fallen bellow searches for the Liberal Party and their leader on three days. More interesting, I think, is that since September 17th the NDP and Jack Layton have been in the Canadian political search rave. While this may relate to how connected Canadians and Google user’s skew politically it should be noted that before the 17th the Conservative and Liberal parties were consistently number 1 and 2 in terms of search frequency.

Now the regional interest graph, this time focused on the NDP:

Regional Interest Graph

In general I think Google’s data here seems to reinforce other things I have been heading. The NDP seems strongest, however, in provinces where the Green party does best. I think it would be more interesting to focus on individual provinces like British Columbia and see if Google’s data for is deep enough to actually look into city by city search trends. If it is deep enough to allow such analysis, at least for populated provinces, it could be used to attempt to predict which way ridings might go on election day.

Finally, the same caviets that I wrote in my first post apply here as well.