Tonight(Tuesday 7th 2008) is the second presidential debate between Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Barack Obama. While the debate is interesting in itself, what is more interesting is what viewers at home are searching for in their browsers during the debate. Thanks to Google, this information is available with their Trends page which keeps a running tally of the most popular search terms entered into Google. After this last debate Google posted an interesting article on how they used this technology to discern peoples interests based on search frequency of terms during the debates, and their search habits as a result of the debates.

The Google Labs Trends website tracks what internet search terms are used and how often they are used. The site keeps a list of the top 100 search terms in their list which is updated by the hour. As well,this wonderful little tool can be linked via RSS feed or just browsed at its site. The user can search for specific frequencies of terms searched to see trends and statistics that they are interested in, entering one term or a list of comma separated terms.

For instance, I can put the terms ESRI and Geographic Information Systems into the trends search. It returns a listing of where the term was searched from based on frequency and the total frequency the term(s) were searched for over time. Click on a location and it breaks things down at a smaller level.

Where this site really becomes interesting is in the realm of Debate interest interpretation. Reading the article posted by Google compiled from the Trend data provides a fascinating look at what people are really interested in getting answers about and at what point of the debate the search frequency peaked. Unfortunately the map related political Trend section is difficult to use. I was hoping their would be some cool mashup action going on there.

Well, debates are on tonight and I am looking forward to watching the Search Popularity Trends from this debate!