Googled: Republicans Double Democrats; Paul Doubles Huckabee; Obama Beats Clinton by a Third

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 -- For the five days between December 7th and 11th, almost a half million searches were performed on one of the 16 Republican or Democratic candidate names using Google. The total number of searches performed on any of the Republican candidate names was almost double that of any of the Democratic candidate names-- 65% vs. 35%, respectively.

People searching on Republican Ron Paul almost doubled that of Mike Huckabee -- 45% vs. 23%, respectively. While, Mike Huckabee had almost double the searches on his name than on either Mitt Romney (12%) or Rudy Giuliani (10%). The other four Republican candidate names were each searched on less than 5%.

The differences between searches done on the Democratic candidate names were not nearly as dramatic. Barack Obama had about a third more searches done on his name than on Hillary Clinton, with Obama getting 44% to Clinton's 28%. John Edwards can claim a solid third place on his name with 11%. Kucinich, Biden and Richardson had between 6% and 4% on their names.

These numbers are very interesting, but what do they mean? Probably every statistician would come up with a different analysis. Is there more interest in the Republican candidates than the Democratic candidates or are Republicans just more Internet literate? Is Ron Paul and Barack Obama more of interest or just less well known than Mike Huckabee and Hillary Clinton? To learn more, use these links for:

  Democratic Names vs. Republican Names Statistics and Graphs
  http://www.vote-usa.org/pr/NamesGoogled/Party%20Names%20Googled.htm

  Democratic Names Statistics and Graphs
  http://www.vote-usa.org/pr/NamesGoogled/Democrat%20Names%20Googled.htm

  Republican Names Statistics and Graphs
  http://www.vote-usa.org/pr/NamesGoogled/Republican%20Names%20Googled.htm

To acquire these statistics, http://www.vote-usa.org/ ran 16 Google AdWord ads, one for each or the 16 Presidential Primary Candidates. The ads were worded exactly the same, except for the candidate's name. And, each ad used only the single candidate name as the complete keyword search list. Consequently, any time a search was performed on one of the candidate's names, an ad would be served. To obtain the number of 'Names Googled' in our statistics and graphs, we used the number of times each candidate's ad was served. These are called impressions. The ads ran all day for five days. Here are the Ads, Keywords and Google Statistics: http://www.vote-usa.org/pr/NamesGoogled/GoogleStats.htm