Google, the current most used search engine in the UK, has created a timeline to track people’s searches on political parties and candidates before the 2010 UK national elections. The tool is design to allow users to follow searches on the three main UK political parties and main politicians form 2004 to the present. By using digital resources, a simple chart and two Youtube videos, this brief post explains the two main peaks of interests behind these searches. Here, what is being basically suggested that the two elecctions are off-line events extremely important to understand media behavior.

This interesting tool also post a questions about how the search engine is keeping track of online interests across time. According to the Google’s site, the indicators are constructed on a scale which take the highest number of searches as 100, and then calculate all other points in the timeline. Before using Google’s data, it would be necessary to evaluate the methodology behind the construction of this type of tools. Results seem to be shaped retrospectively according to previous figures or modified by new highest figures.

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/elections2010/                         
2005 Elections Night                                               2010 First Public Debate and Elections 

The combination of digitalized TV and Google trends seems to be usefull to explain connections between online media and the TV. As a result, this post support the idea that understanding online media in isolation could be an error. Changes in the online behaviour may be directly associated with offline events and especially to mainstream media coverage.