Fascinating article over at Google’s Politics & Elections blog: their analytics team looked at search trends for Occupy Wall Street and compared them with those for the Tea Party, and the results are most interesting.
- Search interest in OWS spiked ahead of the Tea Party in late September and continues to outpace it — by a lot.
- Peak interest in OWS (so far, in mid-October) topped that in the Tea Party (at least slightly) at a similar stage in its development.
- Relative mainstream media interest in the two is stuck in the past, with OWS getting barely more media hits than the Tea Party — a result whose implications track with what we saw earlier on Epolitics.com when we looked at how how much more attention OWS received on social media channels than traditional media channels. Guess what, journalists: people care about OWS…a lot.
Check out the article for more, and note when Tea Party searches typically peak — at tax time.
– cpd