Ron Paul - The ULTIMATE Proof (from an Englishman)

Okay so there's been a lot of blah-blah-blahtey-blah about Ron Paul and whether he's actually making any headway, whether the people are interested, or whether his followers are "drug addled youths" and the like.

So I decided to take a look for the DEFINITIVE PROOF from GOOGLE to see who the people have the most interest in.

These figures are directly from Google (albeit they're about a month behind), and they are the number of searches actually made by real people - ie, the voters - so the people that matter.

Here's a list of the number of EXACT searches [explained below] made in 1 month in the US for each republican candidate:

Ron Paul: 550,000
Michele Bachmann: 368,000
Rick Perry: 246,000
Mitt Romney: 165,000
Rick Santorum: 135,000
Newt Gingrich: 110,000
Jon Huntsman: 74,000
Gary Johnson: 33,100

How did I come up with these numbers?

You can "interrogate" Google to find out how many searches have been made for any keyword or phrase at the Google external keyword tool (search for it in, erm... Google)

You need to make sure you select the US as the local area.
You need to make sure you select EXACT on the left hand side.

Type in names and see what you get.

Things to consider:

This doesn't account for misspellings of names;

The number of searches are at least 1 month behind (will be interesting to see the numbers for December 2011 once we flop over into January);

We don't know who has been searching for these people or why (e.g. one is a woman, maybe she gets a lot more looks from women voters, and/or perverts - Sarah Palin got 450,000 searches last month - wow!);

We can therefore only infer the true level of interest in each re their presedential credentials;

Now, as I said earlier I am an Englishman, I do not fully understand the US voting/election process, and I do not know whats going on over there on a day by day basis with regards to candidates, tv time, news, etc.

I just thought that since there's been a lot of pro Ron Paul people giving him the thumbs up, and a lot of not-pro Ron Paul people giving him the thumbs down (including the press?) that it would be interesting to see who real people are actually looking at.

As stated, I think the biggest drawback of these figures is that they're 1 month at least out of date - and after appearing on TV, having their say, etc, then the numbers will shift and you should get a much clearer idea of who is making good headway, and who's slipping backwards.

If only Auntie Google would kindly produce real-time figures for the elections, it would be a great indicator and probably far more accurate than opinion polls which can be manipulated by the frame of the question, etc.

Anyway, I hope it's of interest, it certainly on the surface of the numbers seems to offer definitive Ultimate proof that Ron Paul is getting more interest from actual people in the US, whether he's getting the same kind of coverage on the TV, etc or not, or whatever the "polls" say.

PS - just to clarify exacts - it is where someone has searched for the EXACT term "ron paul" etc only.

If you leave it set to "broad" it includes all searches with the words in it - "ron paul policies" "what does ron paul eat for breakfast" "who is ron paul" "I'm paul, ron is my cousin" etc.

Exacts give you a much more focused view, although "phrase" could be useful also.

Interesting way of doing it.

Do you know if this tool takes into account multiple searches under the same IP or all they all unique IP addresses?

Such as me searching the same person 300 times that month on my home comp....would that be counted as one or 300

reply to post by Power_Semi


Your thread is titled - The ULTIMATE Proof. What is this proof of?

I'm not voting for Ron Paul and I've looked him up about a hundred and fifty times in the last week.

I can picture it now.....
Paulbots spamming his name in the google bar to make him #1.....yeah that would NEVER happen now that you let the cat out of the bag and they know about the super secret Google poll.