Search Trends and Politics

While eating lunch today I spent a some time looking at Google's Politics & Elections hub. The two aspects of Google's Politics & Elections hub that I fond most interesting are the "Trends" and "Insights."

In the Trends section you can see graphs and heatmaps depicting fluctuations in the number of searches for Presidential candidate's names over the last eleven months. In the Insights section you will find the results of surveys about issues and candidates.

Applications for Education
You could use the graphs in the Trends section to create research prompts for your students. Ask your students to try to determine what might have caused in a spike of searches for a candidate's name. Use the questions in the Insights section as discussion prompts in your social studies classroom.