Just Ahead of the Iowa Caucuses, Google Launches its U.S. Election Site

Frederic Lardinois

02 Jan 2012 — 1 min read

Even though the presidential elections are still nine months away, the political circus in the U.S. is in full swing already (and has been for months), thanks to the impending start of the Republican primaries tomorrow. As usual, Google will offer its own set of tools for keeping track of all the developments during these upcoming months. Today, the company launched Google.com/Elections, which provides votes and journalists with up-to-date news about the campaigns, as well as easy access to Google’s own tools for those directly involved in the political process (Google+, YouTube, AdWords, for example).

Maybe the most interesting aspect of the site is the real-time dashboard, which displays recent search trends, Google News mentions and YouTube video views for all the candidates. The recent surge of Rick Santorum’s campaign, for example, is nicely illustrated by this tool.

Unsurprisingly, Google today also launched a Google+ page for its elections site.

In 2008, Google also offered an election website. That site, however, only launched a few days before the start of the political conventions in August instead of at the start of the primary season. At the time, Google allowed the campaigns and a select group of reporters to highlight specific news stories on the site. It doesn’t look like this feature will make a return this year.

Google Politics Elections

📝Google's surprise AI podcast hit

Google used to be a company where experimentation was encouraged -- or at least it felt like that from the outside. Now it's hard to remember when Google last launched a new product that was an immediate hit. But with NotebookLM and its AI podcasts, Google finally scored

🪧 Pressed words

I don't think anyone outside of Matt Mullenweg had the recent WordPress/WP Engine drama on their bingo card for this year. After a bit of early confusion, I think it's now clear that this is, in many ways, an extension of the open source discussions

🔒Now's the time to prepare for the post-quantum era

I've followed the development of quantum computing for the better part of the last decade. For the longest time, it's been "just around the corner" and with the advent of generative AI, any of the hype around the technology has receded into the background.

The week after CrowdStrike

It's been a week... Given everything that's happened lately, it's hard to believe that the CrowdStrike outages hit only a week ago. We're now deep in the clean-up phase of that particular disaster and while the blame for this particular incident falls

Read more

📝Google's surprise AI podcast hit

🪧 Pressed words

🔒Now's the time to prepare for the post-quantum era

The week after CrowdStrike