Can Google Predict The Results Of The US Election?

By Simon  |  4 Nov 2016 09:00:00

Google Trends is feature of Google that anyone can use. You can access it at https://www.google.co.uk/trends/explore

You can enter any keywords and it will show you the volume of searches for a specified period.

Never before has so much information been available to anyone at the touch of a button.

If you do a search for the last 12 months for the terms Trump and Clinton selecting USA as the country you will get the following graph.

Trump is Blue and Clinton is Red.

If Google searches are a pointer of how people will vote then it looks like a clear win for Trump.

However it has to be taken into account that perhaps Trump gets more searches as he is perhaps a more intriguing candidate that many people don't know much about but would like to find out more. Having said that Hilary Clinton would also get extra searches for the allegations surrounding the alleged email server controversy.

To add balance, lets take a look at the UK's brexit graph. Using the terms Leave EU and Remain EU you get the following result.

Red is 'Leave EU' and Blue is 'Remain EU'

This clearly shows constantly more interest in the Leave campaign. Having said that the majority was far smaller than what the graph would suggest which indicates a lot of people simply wanted to find out more about leaving the EU, but did not vote that way.

To summarise - it looks like Google is a good indicator of election results, however a balancing factor must be taken into account to find eliminate the 'outsider effect'

We'll find out in a few days time how accurate this is.

Simon