Potential voters who take their curiosity about presidential candidates to Google are interested in former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s age, former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s height, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s weight, real-estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump’s net worth, former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina’s marital status and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s birthplace, data showed.
Those were among the top questions that the Internet search engine was asked about each candidate over the past couple of months.
The data, which is being released by Google this year for the first time during a presidential campaign, gives insight into what voters are thinking about that is different from what traditional pollsters provide.
The first lesson might be not to forget the basics: Shortly after Google first released questions posed about each candidate, Republican US Senator Marco Rubio’s campaign released a video in which he answered some of them.
Google gets about 3 billion search requests each day and is beginning to see the value of compiling that information.
Google picked up an intriguing increase in the amount of questions people were asking about British Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party ahead of their victory in the British elections this year, Google News Lab data editor Simon Rogers said.
Height is clearly a preoccupation of Google searchers. Besides Bush, that was the top question about Christie, Ohio Governor John Kasich, former New York governor George Pataki and US Senator Rand Paul.
Age is also a popular query. Two of the top four questions about Christie concerned how much he weighed and how much weight he had lost.
Before the neurosurgeon shot up in the polls late in the summer, voters simply wanted to know: “Who is Ben Carson?”
After questions about her age and height, searchers asked about Clinton: “What did Hillary do wrong?”
Other questions concerned whether she was still running or if she was in trouble.
Some specific questions were asked frequently, such as why Fiorina was fired as Hewlett Packard’s chief executive, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s views on the Iran deal and Rubio’s opinion on marriage licenses for homosexuals.
Google does not publicly release specific numbers on the searches conducted on each candidate.
The Google search information gives an interesting snapshot, Marist College’s Institute for Public Opinion director Lee Miringoff said.
“If you’re a candidate, you ignore information like this at your own peril,” he said.
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