Trump Leads Searches, Social Interest Following Debates

Google tracked the candidates drawing the most search interest throughout the Thursday night Republican GOP presidential debate. Trump led following weeks of being the most-searched presidential candidate. Lesser-known Ben Carson came in second at the end of the debate, and Sen. Ted Cruz also briefly topped search interest in the beginning.

During the debate, the top five 2016 candidates by searches were Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. In the past 24 hours, Cruz spiked in searches Thursday night at 6:16 GMT, but overall Trump held the lead as the notable wildcard as a businessman and entrepreneur.

While the majority of searches for "Donald Trump" during the past 24 hours occurred in New Jersey, as of 10:30 a.m. PDT, interest from those in New York was not far behind. Alabama followed. Massachusetts, Florida, Pennsylvania, and District of Columbia rounded out the top seven. Paul dominated searches in Kentucky, with Bush and Rubio leading in District of Columbia, and Cruz in Alabama.

The general consensus on social media was that Carly Fiorina won the "happy hour debate," but the biggest takeaway was that Donald Trump dominated across the board in the Twitter conversation, receiving 363,000, or 26%, of the total mentions, according to uberVU data from Hootsuite.

Rand Paul came in second place with 153,000 or 23% of total retweets. Jeb Bush got 106,000 mentions, followed by Scott Walker at 102,000; Marco Rubio at 91,000; and Chris Christie at 77,000.

Hootsuite also tracked for sentiment, geographic distribution and key words and phrases on #GOPDebate and #FoxNews. 

No predictions, yet, from Microsoft Bing on the outcome of the election.

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