Enginespy.com

Election Day is fast approaching and the presidential race has certainly been interesting. As the race heats up, we've been collecting and analyzing some fascinating data about how voters are using search during this election. While searches aren't votes, they do provide insight into what's on the collective mind of the electorate. Here are a few highlights: In the past week, Senator Obama has drawn more than twice as many queries as Senator McCain. That's not necessarily all positive, as the nature of the queries indicate that people still have a lot of questions -lookups range from questions about his biography to his birth certificate, from his grandmother to his gun control platform. Interestingly, last week we saw six times as many queries for Cindy McCain compared to Michelle Obama.

As for who's doing all the searching, we often run geographical heat maps to track the queries by state. The map below traces the past week's searches for John McCain in each state in terms of queries per capita. As you can see, Washington, D.C. is intently following his progress, followed by Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina and Ohio.