Barak Obama did an amazing job of leveraging the Internet for fundraising and campaigning. Have the Israeli’s taken note?

Comparing the Google Search engine results for the three candidates it is easy to see that one of the candidates is savvier than the others. We are using Google in our analysis since it is the most popular search engine in Israel. We used the search term which I believe (and Google also believes) most searchers use - full name for Livni and Barak and last name for Netanyahu. This is what Google also thinks as you can see in the screen shot below.

By the way, Google shows that Netanyahu searches are much more popular than the other candidates. Since there are many undecided voters this could be an indication that Netanyahu will win most of the undecideds. However, take this with a grain of salt since Google search volume stats are not that accurate. For more information on predicting outcomes based on web analytics, I recommend you read the book “Click” by Bill Tancer.

Google keyword search results for Livni, Netayahu & Barak

Google trends (not always accurate) also shows that Netanyahu is leading in searches and he is even leading in news coverage (lower graph). This is unusual since he is in the opposition and Barak and Livni are in the government where they can more easily make news. If the graph is correct people in Israel are becoming very interested in Netanyahu.

Google Trends Chart: Netanyahu is blue, Livni is orange and Barak is red. Netanyahu is pulling ahead on Google

Read more about SEO and SMO in the Israeli Elections…

With the release of Chrome, I automatically started to think about how the new Google web browser will affect search engine optimization. After using it for a few minutes it became obvious.

Chrome has a built in default feature which suggests alternative and refined search terms. For example, when I searched for “Jerusalem Hotels” I got the alternatives shown below.

This search for “Jerusalem Hotels”, illustrates how Chrome will influence the importance of certain search phrases.

Chrome will influence searches in 2 ways

1. The alternative suggestions offered by Chrome will no doubt become more important keywords since they are now getting added exposure
2. Misspellings of keywords will become less important since Chrome automatically corrects spelling and some people will click on the suggestions.

How can Chrome influence the search space if it has so few users now?

I can think of 2 reasons:

1. The number of Chrome users will likely increase
2. The alternative suggestion Chrome feature just became a default on Google search called Google Suggest

After 4 years in Google Labs, my guess is that Google decided to make Google Suggest the default in order to make sure it worked properly before making it part of Chrome.

It is interesting to compare the feature on Chrome to the Google Suggest feature shown below. Google Suggest has the same first 3 suggestions as the Chrome browser. However it has more suggestions and also shows the number of results available.

Google Suggest has graduated and is now part of Google Search

For some reason it doesn’t show the number of results for the original search term typed in by the user. In many cases the number of results is not useful. Does it matter if there are 591,000 results or 367,000 results?

On a local note, it is interesting to note that even though the Google development team that worked on Google Suggest is located a few minutes from my office in Haifa, Israel, it doesn’t work on the local interface — Google.co.il – in Hebrew or English