My friend Bill Wilkerson is an expert on tracking google trends and wikipedia data to gain knowledge about salience of issues and events via social media.

His blog provides an interesting perspective on last week’s GOP debate.

http://www.wrwilkerson.com/blog/2015/8/9/wikipedia-debate

Public interest in the 8/6 Republican debate on Wikipedia & Google Trends 

The Thursday, 8/6 prime time Republican debate was the most watched non-sports cable program ever. How did the public respond while watching?

After the debate , Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com posted Google Trends datafor the 10 candidates in the prime time debate. I have been researching Wikipedia as a way to measure public interest and was curious how the page views compared. The table below shows the Google Trends for the 4 hours during and after the debate along with the Wikipedia page views for 8/7 both in raw numbers and in an index based on the most searched candidate, Donald Trump.

Candidate	Google Trends Index	Total Wikipedia Searches	Wikipedia Index
Trump	100	104,303	100
Carson	59	75,495	72
Rubio	38	40,854	39
Cruz	37	37,718	34
Bush	34	34,670	33
Kasich	29	54,306	52
Paul	26	27,267	26
Christie	20	17,957	17
Walker	17	12,881	12
Huckabee	14	11,542	11