Political Insights: Exploring partisanship in Web search queries

Erik Borra, Ingmar Weber
2012 First Monday  
We developed Political Insights, an online searchable database of politically charged queries, which allows you to obtain topical insights into partisan concern. In this paper we demonstrate how you can discover such political queries and how to lay bare which issues are most salient to political audiences. We employ anonymized search engine queries resulting in a click on U.S. political blogs to calculate the probability that a query will land on blogs of a particular leaning. We are thus able
more » ... to 'charge' queries politically and to group them along opposing partisan lines. Finally, by comparing the zip codes of users submitting these queries with election results, we find that the leaning of blogs people read correlates well with their likely voting behavior. Contents Introduction Query logs as a source of data for social and cultural research Political Insights Grounding the data Conclusion and future work About the authors Erik Borra is a Ph.D. candidate and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam's Media Studies department. He is also lead developer for the Digital Methods Initiative, the Ph.D. research program in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. E-mail: borra [at] uva [dot] nl Ingmar Weber is a researcher at Yahoo! Research Barcelona. He works on query log analysis, often with a demographic angle, and on large-scale information extraction from Web content.
doi:10.5210/fm.v17i7.4070 fatcat:o5qlqqvsubgmpdw3ynhuweb7de