How Voters are Using Search Engines in the 2008 Election Cycle

From e.politics:

The Internet has outpaced newspapers as the second most influential channel for election news coverage, after television.

Voters are most concerned about the issues (i.e., they’re more often searching for information about issues rather than directly for information about a given candidate)

Economy and health care issues have increased in search prominence, while global warming is not as hot

...

As for the particular issues, here are the top ten, along with the percentage of searchers hitting each:

Health care - 49%
Economy - 49%
War in Iraq - 48%
Gas prices - 44%
Immigration - 37%
Social security - 37%
Jobs - 35%
Education - 35%
War on terror - 30%
Environment - 30%

These results are obviously useful for the campaigns themselves, but they can also help issue advocacy groups that are trying to piggyback off of the high level of political interest this year. They’re also an interesting angle for looking into voters’ minds — ripe for comparison with polls (i.e., how does aggregate online behavior match up to people’s self-reported interests?)