title: WHO WAS THE MOST “GOOGLED” CANDIDATE DURING THE GOP PRIMARY DEBATE?
text: The Washington Post is of course, befuddled as to what all of this means, so let us break it down for them: FOX News moderators hardly gave Ted Cruz the opportunity to speak, so the viewers who liked what they saw in the brief moments given to Cruz had to do their own research on him (and any of the other non-Trump or non-RINO candidates). I think that about covers it It will be interesting to see what the TV ratings for Thursday night s presidential primary debate look like once they come out.The most Googled candidate in the debate at any point was Ted Cruz   with 67 percent more searches at his peak than the next most-searched candidate s peak.The search volume is all relative to each other; a  100,  the Cruz peak, is the most search in a minute for a candidate.On average, Trump held the most sustained search interest, surprise, surprise. Notice that Ben Carson maintained steady interest, too   followed by Cruz and Marco Rubio.The key point: We have no idea what this means. We don t know if the spike in Cruz searches will convert people to his cause, or the new attention to Carson will boost him in the polls. We don t know. But we do, at least, have some sense of who people wanted to know more about. We ll see if this reveals anything more significant down the road.What the Republican field not named Trump needed to do during the Fox News debate was get people to spread the attention around a bit. With the debate over, it looks like at least some of them did.In the first half hour, people Googled Ted Cruz. As the night progressed, Ben Carson and Marco Rubio started to attract some attention. Jeb Bush got people interested when the moderators mentioned his alleged comments about the businessman   perhaps because they wanted to look up what he said.All data in the graphs above comes from Google Trends.Via: Washington Post