Bush & Kerry Battle It Out In Search

Bush & Kerry Battle It Out In Search

So if it was up to the search engines to decide who would win the Presidential election, would you agree? Found an interesting press release today that I thought could provide some insight into how our favorite candidates are doing in the search engines. I reported back in September on some stats regarding the popularity of the Bush and Kerry daughters. A marketer named Matt Williams at Prominent Placement, published some findings today about what the candidates are doing in terms of search. For the most part it appears that both of the candidates never considered search as an effective means in which to reach voters. Given the amount of people that use search on a daily basis and even more so than in 2000, you would think this slip up would have been avoided. The main problem lies in the ability for interested voters to actually FIND information about them. They have most of the other areas covered, but when it comes to a simple natural search. Nada.

The release goes on to provide some research detailing the specifics of Pay Per Click on Google. Who bids on the candidates names, What they are promoting, How many people, and so on. One funny observation appears to be that Democrats are promoting an online dating website for single Democrats for a searches on “John Kerry”, but Republicans don’t do so for “George W. Bush”. Meaningful, not exactly, but somewhat entertaining. Additionally, there are some findings in terms of searches in natural search:

Searches on the key phrase “John Kerry” outnumber searches done on the key phrase “George Bush” by a 4-to-1 margin. If you also account for those searching on key phrase “George W. Bush,” “John Kerry” is ahead by a 2-to-1 ratio.

Internet searchterms “Republican Party” and “Democratic Party” are even, but searchterm “RNC” shows up one-and-a-half more times than searchterm “DNC.”

Now I did some research myself to validate the findings. For the first part, John Kerry 20,267.7 /day and Bush W. George 15,388.0 /day, close to the 2 to 1 ratio. However one thing I did note was that while most people searched for “John Kerry” more often, the way they searched for information about him differed than those that searched for George W. Bush. Kerry searches leaned towards more generic information such as “john kerry cartoon”, “john kerry senate record”, while those that searched for Bush leaded towards more “issue” related searches such as “george w. bush healthcare” “george w. bush national security”, and “george w. bush miserable failure” just to name a few. Results probably indicative of W being President for the last four years, or a number of things you can decide on.

Read about the findings here.

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Guest Columnist Benjamin Pfeiffer is Associate Editor of Search Engine Roundtable & SEO Chat Forums Moderator.