Google Launches US Presidential Election 2012 Page

Posted: January 6th, 2012 | Author: Michael Courtenay | Filed under: News, Standout | Tags: Elections, google, Google Dashboard, Google Maps, Google News, PBS Election Calendar, Politics, Standout, US Presidential Election, Youtube | Comments Off

Goggle Election 2012 Google has unleasehed it’s new Election 2012 portal, chocked full of every resource a human will ever need or want to know about this year’s US Presidential Election. The site - www.google.com/elections/ - is a dashboard for the multiverse of Google products, as well as some awesome gravity filled links to resources like PBS’s Election Calendar. When you get onto the site, you’re greeted with a Google News-style splash of the latest campaign news. But this is not your typical Google News experience. On the left rail, users are able to filter this Google News stream by candidates, issues and more. The feed has Google usual übercustomization, stretching from journo’s to campaign managers. There’s every chance that you won’t need to leave this monitor to get the entire election coverage, Google has seriously got it covered.

But there’s a lot more than that. The site also provides a trends dashboard, which shows graphs of how each candidate has fared on search, Google News and YouTube mentions.

Another tab is called On the Ground, provides a Google Map showing geotagged content, both news organizations and citizen journalists, bloggers. It’s quite cool and an amusing way to see just what candidates are saying in different regions

Perhaps most exciting is Google’s elections toolkit. Tucked away at the bottom of the right rail is a link to this, which is a guide to how different interests can use different Google products for elections. It includes a t0olkit for media consultants, developers, campaign managers, IT or new media managers and, of course, journalists.

In the case of journalists, Google is mainly showcasing Google trends. “With Google Trends, you can compare American’s interest in every topics, such as politics, elections or candidates,” they write. “Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time.” Included are some clips to show how Google trends have been used in news stories in the past. Other tools featured include Google alerts, Google reader, search insights and YouTube politics.