Google Trends had already predicted virus outbreaks and economic collapses in the past, as well as accurately predicting the identity of the winning candidates in the last three US presidential elections.
Whether you like him or not – Donald Trump has reached the final stretch of the US presidential race. What are his real chances of actually winning? Let’s see what Google Trends, Google’s search analysis tool has to say.
In case you’re not already familiar with it, Google Trends is one of Google’s more interesting tools, it allows users to graphically view the amount of time a certain phrase was searched for on Google’s Search Engine within certain time periods in comparison to the total search volume. This information can be used to discover some interesting findings; Google Trends has been known to accurately predict influenza outbreaks on several occasions based on user searches only days prior to the outbreak, as well as predicting economic events and unemployment data.
In this article we predicted who would win the upcoming US presidential election.
The first question that arose was which search term should be used to determine who would win the next elections. Trump is a provocateur and his statements can generate an online buzz regardless of his popularity as a candidate. Had we looked into how many users were searching for Trump’s name in comparison to the amount of users searching for Clinton’s, we wouldn’t have necessarily been able to tell who the most popular candidate was, but rather could discover who created the bigger stir and public interest.
To find out who the American people really favored we were searching for election signs which people had purchased and used to show their support for the candidate. We used Google Trends to find out how many people were interested in Trump signs in comparison to Clinton’s.
Results showed that the amount of people searching for Trump support signs was higher by threefold in comparison to the amount of people searching for Clinton’s, but was this enough to determine who would win the upcoming elections?
In order to decide, take a look at what happened during the previous elections and how similar searches appeared. Let’s start off by recalling some of the candidates¬¬ and winners from previous years.
2012: Obama vs. Romney – Obama victory
2008: Obama vs. McCain – a decisive victory for Obama
2004: Bush vs. Kerry – a closer run won by Bush
According to the last graph the competition appeared to be tight at certain times, but had we looked at the charts on the left which displayed the total amount of searches for that time period, we could see that Bush was clearly in the lead when voters were searching for candidate support signs.
In conclusion, we presented two additional interesting graphs. First, searches for Trump versus searches for Clinton (each candidate’s name without any additional words). The following map indicates the leading search term in each state – Clinton or Trump. There wasn’t a single US State in which the majority of searches were for Clinton’s name.
And what about the search terms “Vote Trump” versus “Vote Clinton”? There wasn’t a doubt about the identity of the leading candidate as well.
It appears Google searches for candidate support signs during the last three presidential elections have served as an indicator as to the winner’s identity. Based on this measure, Trump’s victory is assured. Will Trump’s provocative nature and colorful, albeit antagonistic personality break this paradigm? We’ll find out in less than two weeks.
This article was written by Nir Adar, CEO of ZEFO – a system for managing and showcasing SEO work, keyword ranking, backlink analysis, and competitor analysis tool. A one-stop shop for your daily SEO management.