Release: Clinton and Rice lead in first Magic Hour Communications Presidential Search Engine Poll

November 2, 2005
For Immediate Release

All references must source at least once:
Magic Hour Communications Presidential Search Engine Poll

For more information contact:
Louis Gudema
Magic Hour Communications
781-647-1600, x234
louis@magic-hour.com

Senator Hillary Clinton holds a strong lead for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination in the first Magic Hour Communications Presidential Search Engine Poll. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has an even more commanding lead over potential Republican candidates, although she trails Senator Clinton in the overall tally.

The Presidential Search Engine Poll was created by Magic Hour Communications, a marketing communications company located in Watertown, Massachusetts. Magic Hour analyzed data on tens of millions of Internet searches to see which candidates were being searched for the most. “We looked at September, 2005, data for searches for the 15 leading Democratic or Republican candidates,” said Magic Hour president Louis Gudema. “We considered only the neutral or positive searches, taking into account likely misspellings. What’s especially interesting is that these results map very well, especially on the Democratic side, to the October 21, 2005, WNBC/Marist Poll.”

Democratic Presidential Candidates:

Republican Presidential Candidates:

“This is a combination of politics and search engine marketing,” said Mr. Gudema. “In keeping with the conventional wisdom -- which says that while Republicans rule the airways with the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, Democrats are stronger on the Internet – the overall level of interest in the Democratic candidates was 16 percent higher than for the Republicans.” Interest inSenator Clinton ran about 10 percentage points higher than for Secretary of State Rice.

As any search engine marketer must, Magic Hour looked at dozens of terms including alternate spellings, such as “Rudy”, “Rudolph” and “Rudi” for Mr. Giuliani and “Joe” and “Joseph” for Mr. Biden. It also considered misspellings, such as “Condoleeza Rice”, “Govenor Jeb Bush” and “Bill First”. The most popular phrases had tens of thousands of searches in the sample of Internet searches Magic Hour reviewed. Magic Hour only considered candidates who had over one percent in the original WNBC/Marist poll

In tabulating the candidate rankings, Magic Hour included only the neutral or positive search phrases, leaving out searches on such phrases as “Condoleezza Rice shoes” and “Wesley Clark metrosexual”. It did not include searches on just the last names. “While a person searching for an uncommon name such as ‘Bayh’, ‘Pataki’ or ‘Gingrich’ was probably looking for Evan Bayh, George Pataki or Newt Gingrich, that certainly wasn’t going to be the case for general terms such as ‘rice’ or ‘bush’, or such common names as ‘Allen’”, said Mr. Gudema. “So, to be fair, we left all of those single-word name searches out of the tabulations.”

Some searchers were obviously interested in the person in their role as a potential candidate, as proven by including terms such as “president” or “2008” in the search phrase. However, Secretary Rice had an especially low number of those candidacy-related searches given the overall interest in her. Magic Hour did note that some candidates had many negatives to counter-balance the positive searches. For example, hundreds of searches were performed for “frist stock”, “bill frist insider trading” and “bill frist investigation”, “john edwards dumb as a rock”, and ‘hillary clinton black panther”.

“Of course, it’s an utterly unscientific poll,” said Mr. Gudema. “It only includes people using and searching on the Internet. You might call it a representative sample of an unrepresentative sample. And Paris Hilton had far more searches on her name than all of the candidates combined. But a Hillary Clinton versus Condoleezza Rice race would be fascinating.”

Magic Hour Communications, Inc., is a marketing communications agency that helps corporations, non-profits, schools and colleges sell, market and educate more effectively by producing Web sites, interactive multimedia, videos, logos, identity and print. For more information go to http://www.magic-hour.com

“Presidential Search Engine Poll” is a trademark of Magic Hour Communications, Inc.