Capturing Curiosity: Using Internet Search Trends to Measure Public Attentiveness

Abstract

While scholars have made great strides in formulating theories and measuring public attention, "most important problem" and media-based indicators are less than ideal measures. In order to address this shortcoming, this article borrows from health-care epidemiology to measure public attention based on Internet search trends. In doing so, it reviews the innovative ways in which scientists have used search activity to track the spread of infectious disease, discusses the ease and flexibility with which search data can be gathered, and then subjects a Google-based search measure to a series of validity tests. In particular, the analysis subjects the proposed measure to a battery of visual and statistical tests for convergent validity by comparing it with the most commonly used media-based measure of public attention-issue coverage in the New York Times. Across a range of policy issues (health care, global warming, and terrorism), the proposed measure demonstrates convergent validity. The article concludes by posing a series of important questions that the new measure will allow researchers to address.

<b>Mujeres, política y subrepresentación. Un estudio sobre la correlación entre cualidad de la democracia, ideología y mujeres en los parlamentos

“…Son escasos los estudios que buscan identificar tendencias ideológicas a través de la herramienta Google Trends, sin embargo, los resultados, hasta entonces, muestran que Google Trends es un fuerte termómetro para asuntos de ideología y preferencias (Kahn & Kotchen, 2010;Gries, Crowson & Sandel, 2010;Ripberger, 2011;Borra & Weber, 2012;StephensDavidowitz, 2013;Gruszczynski, 2013). Eso, considerando que el mismo permite no apenas encontrar tendencias como también encontrar la distribución geográfica de las mismas.…”

Public Attention and Head-to-Head Campaign Fundraising: An Examination of U.S. Senate Elections

“…This decision was made for three reasons: First, Google is the most 3 widely used search engine in the United States. According to Hitwise, Google owns approximately 68% of the US market share, as compared to Yahoo, which is the next closest at roughly 14% (Ripberger 2011). As such, collecting data on Google rather than Yahoo or Bing 4 searches yields the largest cross-section to the Internet-using population.…”

“…Voters also might consider certain issues to be important when asked, but do not dedicate time or resources exploring the issue. Distinguished from both public opinion -which provides direction of opinion -and issue salience, public attention denotes the active process wherein members of the public selectively allocate limited resources (time and other) towards processing information about a particular signal (or set of signals) while ignoring others (Ripberger 2011). In other words, was a candidate successful in getting her name in the limelight enough that someone was interested in finding more information about her?…”

“…We define 2 public attention as the scarce resources-time and other-that boundedly rational citizens willingly devote to processing information about a particular topic (Ripberger 2011). Though related, it is not the same thing as public opinion or issue salience.…”

“…According to StatCounter, another prominent web analytics provider, Google's market share is much higher, 4 accounting for approximately 81% of the search engine market (Ripberger 2011).…”