There’s an enlightening post on the official Google blog which shares some of the data trends from the search engine during last week’s American vice-presidential debate: candidates, questions and queries.

I love this kind of data where people’s intentions are so clear (everybody ’straight talks’ into Google) and present in such large numbers.  I was especially pleased to see this as it’s similar to some of the techniques that go into our Opinion Tracker.  We think there’s amazing potential to improve online opinion research in this way, by listening to and understanding the existing ‘word on the web’; hopefully exercises like this one by Google will continue to prove the reliability and value of these approaches.