If you’ve ever wondered about Jeb Bush’s real name, Chris Christie’s height, how many kids Carly Fiorina has or whether Marco Rubio is Canadian (yes, Marco Rubio), then you have lots of company, according to Google Trends.
This arm of the search giant crunches data from the more than 3 billion searches Google processes each month, and occasionally releases synopses of what it finds about some suitable topic. The New Hampshire primary, which is positively dripping in things that people want to know about, is perfect fodder for their analysis.
Here’s some of what they found people care about, judging from trending searches as of midday Thursday:
∎ Lots of people don’t know that John Ellis Bush is the basis of “Jeb.” (There is historical precedent for such an acronym: The best-known Jeb in American history, Confederate Gen. Jeb Stuart, was born James Ewell Brown Stuart.)
∎ Despite comments about the size of the New Jersey governor, many more people wanted to know that Christie is 5-foot-11 rather than how many pounds he carries.
∎ Candidates both male and female faced questions about their children, but the question was highest on the list for Fiorina, who has two stepdaughters. Unlike Bush, however, her unusual name (her first and middle names are Cara Carleton, “Carly” is a nickname) did not draw notable curiosity.
∎ Hillary Clinton was the only candidate whose age was one of the five top-trending questions. She is 68. The issue wasn’t in the top-five list for Bernie Sanders, who is six years older.
∎ Google isn’t perfect: It listed “immigration” twice on Sanders’s list of top-five trending issues, at both No. 1 and 4. Both listings were spelled the same, if you were wondering about that.
∎ The question of Ted Cruz’s birth in Canada has been a minor issue in the GOP primary and showed up as a top-five trend for him, but for some reason it also showed up as a top-five query for Rubio. Rubio’s parents came to the United States from Cuba – not Canada – long before he was born.
∎ People in northern Vermont are really, really interested in the New Hampshire primary. Searches about our primary were a larger component of overall searches for the Burlington region than anywhere in the country, even more than any part of New Hampshire.
They’re probably jealous
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