Links are recommendations?
Search engines often focus on inbound links to understand relevance and popularity of a site, page or piece of content. So we applied the same type of thinking to the candidate sites. As an example Eric Miraglia's Page Inlink Analyzer (available at his blog) uses Yahoo and Delicious APIs to provide a powerful tool for examining a site's inbound links. If we apply this metric to the two campaign sites, we see that the different traffic patterns we have noted so far are reflected in and no doubt sustained by similar differences in link popularity. Once again, Obama's site (with over 1.7 million inbound links) maintains about a 2-to-1 overall advantage over McCain's (with about 0.8 million):
Using a similar type of simple approach within the Google realm to measure links in its site index, the results for McCain's links and Obama's links show more links for Obama, but we must note that overall volume here is much lower.
In order to take into account the possibility of link tainting, we observed what Google indexed for each site. The site index footprint for McCain's site has a whopping 30,000 URLs recorded to Obama's sub-3,000 level. So the inbound link vote is certainly not a function of the site size index wise, but rather appears to be a legitimate view of outside interest with Obama again having more votes by inbound link. However, is this a result of effective promotion and grass roots organization or does it show real interest?
Online prediction
Finally, we looked at online trading. Intrade, the online prediction outfit used for non-sports-related events has offered contracts for the major candidates throughout the campaign season. These contracts trade at US$0.10 per point, in a range of 1-100 points. Because prices are limited to that range, a price of 50 points for a candidate's contract indicates that the market is estimating a 50 percent probability of that candidate winning the race.
Interestingly, if we examine the trends in daily closing prices for the candidates' respective contracts, we find them mapping reasonably well onto the broad measures of popularity that we found when looking at traffic to their respective campaign Web sites. Obama's contract was comfortably above 60 points for much of the US summer. It then fell below 50 points (50 percent probability) for the first time in the week following the Republican convention. During that same week, McCain's contract rose above 50 points for the first time in the campaign. Then, just as quickly as they had converged, the trends lines separated again, with the Obama contract rising, and the McCain contract falling, from mid-September on.
