12/13/2023 0 Comments Google trends election 2016This inherently selective use of Google data to comment on post-referendum results, as opposed to Davidowitz’s more detailed research, was perhaps anecdotal and instead fed into sensationionalism at the time. In addition to reports of declines of stock prices, the British media discussed the most popular search terms on Google that day, including the question “what’s the EU” which, for some, signaled indifference and a lack of recognition of the seriousness of the situation among voters. His NYT article made waves, and became one of the first uses of Google Trends, not so much to predict but to contradict official pooling.Ī slightly different use of Google Trends to comment on the exercise of the democratic right to vote followed the 2016 referendum on EU membership (Brexit) in the UK. Against the claims that were popular at the time, Davidowitz went to show that prejudice was still a thing in a modern America. He traced it back to a racial prejudice, for which evidence was piling up from Google Searches made in Colorado and Ohio. Something that was holding Obama’s popularity score at much lower rate than the one he predicted for him. Controlled for a strong Democratic support in 2008, and historic data on support for John Kerry in 2004, Davidowitz also estimated the votes Obama should have got – for example he estimated Obama to control about 57% of the vote in Denver and in Wheeling whereas in reality, his victory in those two cities was much smaller – he only received 48% of the vote there.įor Davidowitz, it was clear that something was missing from the estimates. The scale from the map was later correlated with the final percentage of votes Barack Obama received in each state. He achieved that by creating a map of racially charged states using Google searches that included the word “n****r” and measured how popular such searches were across the country. He famously argued his point, in a n NewYork Times article in which he demonstrated that racial aversion played a huge role in the presidential election in the United States in 2009 and that Barack Obama, as a future president had to overcome far more adversity than anyone had expected or any election poll at the time had revealed. Davidowitz believes the conditions under which people search on Google – most likely on their private devices, and alone – are more suited for gathering real opinions, concerns, and sentiments of people, than traditional surveys. It aged well, and managed to attract a varied pool of devotees, that includes marketers, journalists and scientists who turn to it whenever they struggle to decipher human psyche – in other words, always when on duty.Īmong its die-hard practitioners is Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a scientist whose PhD thesis was based on data from Google Trends, and who was among the first to position the tool as an alternative to traditional sociological research, which he thinks often fails to quantify human behaviours with precision. Google Trends is a handy marketing tool that was launched over 14 years ago for measuring the popularity of search queries in Google’s search engine across the globe. Google Trends is believed to help predict everything from market movements to the most popular Halloween costumes, but what happens if we try to predict political elections with it?
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