The impact of Internet search on politics.    I’m Fred Fishkin with BootCamp, your Techstination for gadgets and gear.     Where do you turn to get information on political candidates?    More and more of us are turning to Google.    During last month’s political conventions, Google was able to monitor search trends almost immediately…and says Google’s political search trends expert Simon Rogers….that is new…

“We’ve never had real time search data before.  In the past, you’ve had to wait a few days, it was like two or three days old.  Now we only have to wait two or three minutes.  So we can see in real time what people are searching for, where people are searching and what they’re asking about it.  The only comparison I can think of is the very early days of polling.  When people first started doing polling and literally just added up the number of people who said yes compared to the number of people who said no and then you had to weight it and look at it in different ways to get meaning out of it and I think we’re at that stage with search data.”

And the trends can change quickly.   Stay tuned.   You can find us at BootCamp.com.   I’m Fred Fishkin.