Googling the next election

It's almost time once again to ask the question as to whether Google can predict the result of an election. My intuition, without looking at Google is that the coming UK general election will be a landslide conservative win. The labour party have been in power for a long time, made many unpopular decisions, and are typically held to be at least partly responsible for the current economic stagnation. But my predictions about election outcomes are frequently wrong, and Google suggests that this is going to be the case once more.

Looking at the trends for the three main parties over the last year it looks like the conservatives are consistently getting more news coverage, but that in search volume - arguably a better measurement of what the populous are really interested in - labour still ranks more highly than conservative by a ratio of 2:1. Looking back to 2009 and 2008 we can see that the search gap between the two parties has been narrowing, but not by enough to cause the lines to cross.

Going back to the previous general election in 2005 it can be seen that Google successfully anticipates the outcome based upon search volume, even though the news volume was slightly higher for the conservatives prior to election day. Unless electioneering dramatically alters the views of floating voters it seems possible that the same pattern could be repeated, contradicting my prior expectations - which are mainly derived from reading the news.