Over at his blog, Erik Heels suggests that based on current data, Hillary Clinton will beat Barack Obama. Only he gets it slightly wrong: he compared Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama. Here’s the chart Erik came up with:
Barak Obama (blue) vs. Hillary Clinton (red)
I thought this was a bit odd: why weren’t there any news reference points for Barack? Then I realized: he spelled Barack’s name wrong. With Barack’s name spelled correctly, check out the difference:
Barack Obama (blue) vs. Hillary Clinton (red)
Note that this doesn’t entirely challenge Erik’s reasoning: many people will spell Barack’s name wrong (my search logs prove this: several commenters referred to him as Barak on my site, leading to a lot of traffic as a result). But I think with the corrected name used as a reference point, plus the combination of the misspelled name and the corrected name, leads one to conclude that Barack’s doing quite well for a freshman Senator in overall national awareness and interest.
[...] Rick Klaus showed last week that Obama will win if Google can be used as an indicator. He looked at the graphs posted by Erik Heels which seemed to show that Hillary Clinton would win but Klaus found that Heels had misspelled Obama’s first name as Barak. While “Barak Obama” trails Clinton in hits, Barack Obama wins easily. As I found when I misspelled Dick Devos’s name during the Michigan Governor’s race, there’s lots of Google hits on a misspelled name, but not as many as on the correct spelling. For a small blog, however, it might bring in more hits to misspell someone’s name as many people misspell names in a search and there is less competition for hits on the incorrect spelling. Rick Klaus also looked at on line ad strategies and Obama today. Written by Ron ChusidLast 5 posts by Ron ChusidSanta Slammed in War on Christmas - December 11th, 2006Creationist Teaching Aids Banned in Great Britain Science Classes - December 10th, 2006Chopra Concludes, Responding to Criticism - December 10th, 2006War on Terror Over - December 10th, 2006Iraq Study Group Echoed Kerry's Warnings - December 9th, 2006 [...]
ReplyDelete