Wednesday, May 06, 2015

The UK Election Based on Google Trends


Simon Rogers has created a map of the most searched for UK political party leaders in each electoral ward. Election 2015 - Most Searched for Leaders on Google shows which of the UK's political leaders have been most searched for on Google during the last 12 months.

Mouse-over a constituency on the map and you can view the most Googled leader, the current MP and the party they represent. The map could be interesting as a general guide to the media exposure of each political leader but I very much doubt it provides much of a guide to the likely votes in tomorrow's general election.

David Cameron is the most searched for leader. He is prime minister of the country so you would expect him to have featured in a lot of searches over the last twelve months. Nigel Farage of the UKIP party is in second place, which does show how much Farage has been able to influence the political agenda over the last twelve months.


This is the second UK election themed map which has made use of Google Trends data. The Google's Election 2015 - The Final Debate map shows searches on Google for each party leader during the BBC's UK Election debate on April 30th.

I guess the map gives some general sense about who people were searching for on Google during the debate and when & where they were searching. I'm just not sure why I should care or what I can learn from the map. The data behind the map might possibly be informative about the general support for each of the party's leaders but it's a bit hard to make any sense from the noise of data on this map.

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