Complete Story
08/13/2018
Cleveland.com is working with Google to use data to inform elections coverage
What might Google's search data reveal about this year's elections in Ohio? Cleveland.com's politics team is working with the tech giant to try and find out.
As part of its News Lab project, Google has custom-built for cleveland.com a more targeted, politically focused version of its public Trends tool. We are using it to inform and enrich our coverage, and we hope it will help us provide insights to our readers that they won't get anywhere else.
The public Trends tool takes all of Google's search data, anonymizes it (no individual accounts are identified) and aggregates it, identifying trending topics in real time. You can filter it down to see what people are most interested in on the state level or even individual cities.
The custom Ohio tool shows how frequently, broken down by county, people are searching for information about the main candidates for governor and Senate, and more broadly, what Ohioans are typing in when they do so. Each county displays a rating, which fall on a scale of 1 to 100, measuring the volume of searches, as a proportion of total searches, related to each individual candidate.
