Google Trends and Elections 2008

• Marty Martin
• October 1st, 2008
• Metrics
• 0 Comments

There are many different metrics tools out there in the wider web for measuring traffic trends, but one of the more recent (and also free) has been Google Trends for search and Google Trends for websites. The use of web metrics for predicting the outcome of popular elections is by no means original to me, but it's worth writing again to explore the current scenario. One important thing to keep in mind about Google Trends and other web traffic estimators is these numbers have been normalized, which is to say they do not represent specific numbers but "the division of multiple sets of data by a common variable...allowing underlying characteristics of the data to be compared" [credit].  That is why they're called "trends" and not actual "statistics".