Trending Searches on Google Trends About Politics

What is Google Trends

Google Trends is a site offered by Google that gives real-time information about aggragate search history for a given region. For bloggers, this is a great place to find topics to write about that have a decent chance of scoring some traffic from Google Search. In this instance, I used it to find information about politics and create this post.

What is Special About This AP News Resource

This resource shows what people searching about most and most importanly, by region, what they are searching for most. Which states or regions are searching the most information on the: economy, abortion, health care, crime, Social Security, and unemployment?

What I Found Interesting About It

1. Around the 4th of July searches related to the afore-mentioned topics declined markedly. Apparemtly, people tend to do less political research during holidays.

2. Searches about the Supreme Court showed the most volatility and least amount of consistent interest.

3. More urban areas tend to be searching more about economic issues.

4. Searches related to abortion are more prevalent in “red states”.

5. Social Security during this time period was searched a lot in each state, except California.

These are just a few examples of observations that can be made using this tool. It is engaging just on a satisfying of one’s curiosity level, but also could be excellent fodder for further research, conversation or blogposts.

Election Resource for Teachers and Students

This resource could be very useful to teachers as well as they try to illustrate the differences in the electorate in the U.S. by region and issue. I know one U.S. Government teacher who will be using it😉

Possible Essay Question

1. Conpare and contrast different reguons of the U.S. using the A.P. news search history data. What patterns by issue and region do you see? Explain using the data and relevent exanples.

Thanks for stopping by The Lifelong Learning and Education Blog. What do you thi k about this free resource? Did you find it surprising, predictable or somewhere in between?