Political Search Trends: The partisanship behind popular Web queries | The Signal - Yahoo! News
Linguistic researchers have gotten very good at teaching computers to recognize a person's political bent when he or she takes to Twitter to spout off about politics. Thanks to their algorithms, we can measure how positive or negative people are about candidates and topics on the microblogging platform without tasking some poor junior staffer with reading 100,000 tweets and categorizing them as mean or nice.
This method of "sentiment analysis" doesn't work for search engine queries, however, since people don't tend to show their cards when looking for information online—they just type in a few keywords about a subject without much clue as to what their opinion about it may be.
