UKIP Has a Clear Majority – On Google

If the general election were decided by Google searches rather than votes, Nigel Farage would already be measuring up for curtains in Number 10. The Eurosceptic party has driven four times more internet traffic than any of the other parties the Daily Telegraph reports.

The party has been leading the race for hits since the start of the year, but since 28 March, searches for UKIP have more than doubled in number. The other parties have also seen a moderate increase in their traffic with searches for the Conservative Party also more than doubling since the same date, however they still have less than a fifth of the search traffic UKIP has generated.

Nigel Farage is also out performing David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg in the Google stakes with the UKIP leader featuring in significantly more searches than any of the other three. However, Nicola Sturgeon leads the leaders as the 115th most popular search term.

Figures from Google showing how people navigated to news and media websites through the search engine show that the party is the 71st most popular term to take users to media websites, far higher than any of the other parties.

Over 300,000 searches were made for UKIP during March far more than for any other party. The three “establishment” parties do not feature at all in the top 1000 searches, with the Greens featuring at number 575 and the SNP at 198.

Statistics showing the type of people who had visited the various parties’ websites showed that the section of the population who had visited UKIP’s website were young people who lived in modern housing, healthy retirees and well educated people with young families. The Conservative Party’s website by contrast was mainly visited by older people, many falling into the second wealthiest section of society.

Also leading people to UKIP’s website were searches about HS2. UKIP has been a high profile opponent of the £50 billion high-speed link between London and Manchester. Nigel Farage last year described Britain as too “skint” to afford the project, which he claims will only benefit, “a small number of travelling customers in this country.” The only other party opposing the project are the Greens with all other parties in favour of it.