ReadWriteWeb has an article entitled "Google Has Changed Political Debate Forever" in which they  say...

When Sarah Palin and Joe Biden debated in front of one of the largest TV audiences in US election history last week, they might not have been Googling things during the debate, but millions of people watching the debate were. Today Google released some information about what kinds of things viewers were searching for as that debate unfolded, minute by minute. It is amazing both that viewers were able to do such a thing, in real time, and that we're able to watch what people are searching for.

The collective search history provides an interesting look at the world's reaction to what the candidates are saying.

I don't think this tells us anything to be honest and to prove it I'd like to take a look at Google Trends for a sec.

Right now the #1 search on Google's Hot Trends is the name "Bart Whitaker."  Mr. Whitaker is the student who hired his roomate to kill his family so that he could collect the inheritance.  The reason his name is registering highly today is because his father is appearing on Oprah.  Here's the chart showing his jump to #1 on the Trends list. 

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Now the chart is a percentage of search volume which can obviously vary but what we do know is that Oprah has an average of about 7 million viewers a day and that not all of those viewers immediately jumped online.  Even if we assume a third of them did (which would still be high statistically) you're talking a little over a couple million people. 

Now lets go back to the debate.

Looking at the chart ReadWriteWeb used we can see the the volume is much higher during the debate but if the scale is even relatively the same we're probably looking at about 6 million searches on the very highest term. 

debatehistory.png

Given the debate was watched by an estimated 70 million viewers that makes the number of viewers represented by Google Trends statistically insignificant.  Not only that, I think it's a pretty good bet that the people represented by these numbers are all similar in age/interests/etc... (e.g. people who are online during a debate are probably going to be very similar to each other).  Making the numbers that much more insignificant statistically .

Bottom Line: These numbers come no where close to representing what "the world's reaction" was to the debate.

Don't get me wrong, I love it when Google releases these type of numbers.  I find it fascinating.  I'm just making the argument for context here.  The trend among technology people is to assume that everyone's online, and everyone's using Google, and everyone loves technology just as much as we do.  But it isn't the case.  In fact, a third of the United States still doesn't even have Internet Access at home and 24% on top of that are still on dial up (which I assume are not the type of people to be online throughout a debate)

In the last Presidential Election over 122 Million people voted which is a huge amount.  Assuming 6 million or so random people tells you anything about how the group as a whole feels is kidding yourself.