Election-Trends: The Google Search Pollster

I found this cool mash-up of Google Search & Google Maps at the site of a programmer and mash-upper called Mibazaar. It shows the top cities that performed a certain search on Google.

I thought I’d look at the geographic trends for some of the searches this blog has looked at previously.

First: “palin rape”. This search is most likely related to the question of Sarah Palin’s town charging rape victims for the cost of their own rape kits. It may also include people searching for Ms. Palin’s views on abortion after rape. The top cities that performed these searches in the last 12 months were:

1. New York NY
2. Minneapolis MN
3. Washington DC
4. San Francisco CA
5. Seattle WA

Comparing this to the search for the term “born alive”, which describes a controversial piece of abortion-related legislation that Obama apparently voted against in Illinois. Here are the top cities that performed this search in the last 12 months:

1. Washington DC
2. Reston, VA* (note, this is an AOL proxy server location)
   
3. St. Louis MO
4. Philadelphia PA
5. Chicago IL

Although you see a touch of a trend here, with the “palin rape” search tending to take place in more liberal locales, I wonder if it’s stronger for some of the more extreme partisan searches. Here are the top cities for the term “obama muslim”:

1. Charlotte NC
2. Orlando FL
3. Houston TX
4. Dallas TX
5. Austin TX

(What’s going on with those folks in Texas?) And here is the list for “bush lies:”

1. Seattle WA
2. Los Angeles CA
3. San Francisco CA
4. Chicago IL
5. Atlanta GA

Now, we’re seeing a noticeable demarcation between the liberal cities searching for the anti-Bush phrase, and the North Carolina-Texas-Florida axis searching for “obama muslim.”

Got a search that you’d like to see cities for? Post it in the comments.

-The Google Pollster