Michele Bachmann: Internet search earch auto-complete terms

The tables below are for the Google and Yahoo search “Michele Bachmann “(including a space after the last name) for the various dates indicated in the table. Each column has the date of the search and the top five Google or Yahoo auto-complete terms for the search.

Michele Bachmann – Google

8-17-2011	8-22-2011	8-23-2011	8-29-2011	8-31-2011 – present
quotes	quotes	quotes	quotes	quotes
corn dog	husband	husband	husband	husband
husband	bio	bio	bio	wiki
elvis	corn dog	slavery	slavery	husband gay
bio	slavery	husband gay	husband gay	hot

Michele Bachmann – Yahoo

8-24-2011	8-29-2011	9-1-2011	9-2-2011	9-7-2011
hot	hurricane	hurricane	new hair	campaign manager
for president	sarasota	irene	margaret thatcher	hurricane irene
minnesota	hot	hot	hot	hot
bio	for president	for president	for president	for president
feet	minnesota	minnesota	minnesota	minnesota

What does all this mean?  I have no idea, but I suspect it will be difficult to win a Republican party nomination and then a general election with terms like “slavery” and “husband gay” attached to your name.

Another thought: I wonder if the political affiliations of users are constant across the three major search sites or are there a greater percentage of liberals on Bing than on Google, for instance.  Could you use auto-complete terms to gain any insight into this?  Or is this type of information perhaps already available?

Cheers.

Multidimensional Scaling, Republican Presidential Candidates, and “a douchebag”

If you don’t want to read this whole thing, just check out the graph: Multidimensional Scaling: Republican Candidates – 8/16/2011

I was having a conversation with some friends today and someone mentioned that Rick Perry might have problems in the election because there were rumors he was gay.  So I went to google and typed in “Rick Perry is” and google kindly offered me the following auto-complete options: “gay”, “an idiot”, “a rino“, “evil”, “not a conservative”.  This got me thinking how this compared with the other candidates google auto-completes.  For instance, if you google “Mitt Romney is” you get suggestions like “a mormon” and ” an idiot” as well as three other suggestions.  I did this for all of the major candidates (sorry Thaddeus) and recorded the five google auto-complete suggestions.

Then I created a vector for each candidate based on the google auto-complete words.  Each candidate was an observation and each word was a variable.  The candidate would get a 5 if the word was first on their list, a 4 if it was second, and so on with a 0 if the word was not mentioned in their auto-complete.

I then used multidimensional scaling (the cmdscale function in R) to allow me to visually display the relative positions of the candidates to each other.  This all led to this graphic: Multidimensional Scaling: Republican Candidates – 8/16/2011.  The location of the circles is based on multidimensional scaling, the size of the circle is relative to their standings in a national poll taken from fivethirtyeight.com, and the top five google auto-completes are displayed in or near the appropriate circle.

Some thoughts:

• Every single candidate has the term “an idiot” in either the first or second auto-complete term
• 3 candidates were listed as “hot” (Palin. Bachmann, and Romney)
• “stupid” was only used to describe women
• Perry and Santorum (who has a much bigger google problem that anything I’ve listed here) had “gay” listed in their autocpmpletes and Pawlenty had “definitely not gay”
• Bachman and Palins circles are nearly identical in size (11.7% ad 11.4%, respectively) and words (they share “an idiot”, “hot”, and “stupid”)
• “a douchebag” appears in auto-completes for Santorum, Gingrich, and Pawlenty.  I imagine it will be hard to win with this word attached to your name. (John Kerry couldn’t do it.)
• The only overwhelmingly positive google auto-complete was for Herman Cain whose fifth auto-complete option was “awesome”

It can’t be good for Perry that he is so close to Pawlenty and Santorum, but he does have a significant amount of support at this point.  I’ll be interested to see how these Google auto-completes changes over time and with the polls.

For information on how Google auto-complete works, click here.

Cheers.