Hey Juanita,

I saw your preview of last night’s GOP debate. I work with the team at Google who provided the trends data for the debate. Based on the reaction this morning, voters are turning to the web to find out more about the issues, candidates, and the race. The team @ Google has been closely watching search trends around the race and found that – just like polls showed – searches surged for Rick Perry’s name after he joined the race. They also found that important primary states are some of Ron Paul’s best for search traffic.

http://googlepublicsector.blogspot.com/2011/09/taking-peek-at-political-trends-ahead.html

Last night, much of this data was incorporated directly in the debate itself and more interestingly, Google has quickly rolled up their sleeves to sift through the huge amount of data that was pulled in *during* the debate. Former New Mexico Governor appeared to steal the show as searches for him spiked well above the presumed front runners. You can find that data here.

http://googlepublicsector.blogspot.com/2011/09/searching-fox-newsgoogle-debate.html

I thought you and your readers would find this interesting, especially because I think these search trends provide a pretty good proxy for how the public reacted to the debate in real time.

Take care,
Chris