What is an SEO astrologer, is she an SEO or an astrologer, or is she someone from Mars? Well, none of them. Infact, the title is more of related to closely we can understand user behavior to come up with some conclusions, even if they are about a 100% unpredictable domain; the “psyche of a voter”. Let me tell you what I am trying to do here. I am using a couple of web based tools to predict the web searchers interest, strictly in India and try to find out whether it’s the BJP/the congress or the ubiquitous “others” who win this race to power center.

So now, I am on Google Trends and I am trying to find out in a reasonable time frame (last 12 months) what the searchers are looking out for. Just for the non-tech geeks, Google trends shows you exactly that; trends. Trends across regions and across time periods, for searches that have been done on the Google search engine.

advani manmohan sonia gandhi narendra modi mayawati

This is the first graph that Google Trends generates for me. Mr. LK Advani is miles ahead of the rest of his competitors and seems that in the recent past, his popularity has nothing but grown. This screenshot from below tells more

The dip towards the end is more because the polling ended across India and people went back to work. Now as the election results come later this month, things will start heating up, again.

Now, it comes to where is it that Mr. Advani is popular across states. It seems that he is a clear winner in many of the states, except Tamil Nadu and the competition between him and Mrs. Sonia Gandhi is quite stiff in Madhya Pradesh. And Man! You see the popularity of Mr. Narendra Modi in Gujarat, far ahead as compared to anyone.

Now that data might be because of the stupendous personal branding campaign that Mr. Advani has undertaken on the web to capture the web savvy audiences. Definitely, it seems that Google Adwords and Google Adsense have been remarkably used by Mr. Advani’s team to promote his persona on the web. Google Adwords helps you buy search inventory on Google.com and partner sites for keyword searches and Adsense displays ads on Google’s content network. These ads are “Advani for PM” display ads in which you see Mr. Advani’s photo. Google is the most preferred search engine in India and the Adsense platform has millions of publisher sign-ups. BJP has purchased huge keyword sets which are related to politics, ideology, history, voting and other areas. The online campaign has definitely paid for Mr. Advani, at least Google Trends vouches for it.

advani manmohan

Let us sway a little away from this personal branding and move towards party oriented search patterns. Let us see what Indians are searching for.

Another web tool from Google called Insights for Search gives no different data. I conducted searches for the same personalities except that I replaced Dr. Manmohan Singh with Mr. Rahul Gandhi. He comes in as a distant number 2 to Mr. Advani, but appears to be ahead of Dr. Singh. Bright future.

When I change the Index from Web Search To News Search (this index is derived from Google News), Mr. Narendra Modi is a distant first. No press is bad press, right?

Another very interesting piece of comparison that gives the Congress a cheer on its face is Technorati. The world’s biggest blog search engine tells us about mentions on a particular keyphrase. Bloggers are mentioning Dr. Singh more as compared to Mr. Advani. Mr. Varun Gandhi gets a good spurt with that Peelibheet episode.

manmohan vs. advani vs. rahul gandhi vs. narendra modi vs. varun gandhi

So, how about the predictions? Well, this is a domain that I won’t enter. I gave you some food for thought. Enjoy it. I will try to post again after the election results are out to understand if these searches and brand mentions really mean anything or are just a very small representative sample.