London - After months of campaigning, Americans are today finally voting for the 44th president of their country. The US research team have been doing a great job monitoring search behaviour across the pond, so I thought I’d have a look at what’s been happening in Britain. The chart below illustrates the volume of searches for the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates in the UK this year, with Gordon Brown added in to give some context.

As you can see, the Democrat candidate Barack Obama has received more searches than his Republican rival every week save for a couple at the end of the summer. However it is Senator McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, who has been the most searched for American politician in the UK over the last couple of months. Searches for the Governor of Alaska shot up following her addition to the McCain ticket, although she was finally overtaken by Senator Obama last week. The low volume of searches for Joe Biden is primarily a result of the minimal amount of news coverage he has received in the UK compared with the Presidential candidates and his Republican counterpart.

As in the US, our search term variations data from the last 4 weeks gives an insight into what things people are associating with each candidate. Like their American counterparts, British searchers are also curious about Barack Obama’s heritage and religion, with ‘barack obama biography’, 'barack hussein obama’, ‘barack obama muslim’, ‘barack obama birth certificate’, and ‘barack obama middle name’ all included in the top 10 searches including the term ‘barack obama’.

The main focuses of searches for Sarah Palin are her Saturday Night Live appearance, her doppelganger Tina Fey, and her physical appearance – both ‘sarah palin hot’ and ‘sarah palin sexy’ included in her top 10. Searches for McCain are more conventional, with terms such as ‘biography’ and ‘wiki’ making appearances, as well as searches of his wife. The only exception is the term ‘john mccain vampire’, which refers to a controversial Photoshopped picture of the Arizona Senator.

Wikipedia has been the biggest recipient of traffic from UK Internet searches for the 4 candidates, accounting for almost a quarter of clicks over during the last 4 weeks. After the politicians own homepages, the next biggest recipients have been News and Media sites, with Google News (both the UK and US properties) topping the list. The Times has been the most successful newspaper site, and its search marketing campaign has obviously paid off. The final significant category of sites is Social Networks and Forums, with YouTube, Facebook and MySpace all appearing in the top 20.

I should finish off with the usual caveat that Internet searches don’t equal votes – particularly if the people doing the searching live in another country and therefore aren’t entitled to vote in the election!

Robin Goad

Robin Goad is Research Director, Hitwise UK. This piece was originally published on Hitwise analyst blog here. 

Image by John and Keturah