The Indirect Impact of Palin's Popularity

Last week my Heritage Foundation colleague Todd Thurman noticed something unusual with web traffic on Heritage.org. Search engines, primarily Google, were sending far more people to the site than usual -- and almost all of it to a research paper from 2005.

The reason? Sarah Palin.

Prior to Aug. 29, the day John McCain picked her as his running mate, Palin was mentioned by name only a handful of times on Heritage.org. So why did our web traffic spike?

Back in October 2005, Heritage senior research fellow Ron Utt wrote a paper on the Bridge to Nowhere, which at the time focused on Sen. Tom Coburn’s attempt to transfer the $223 million for the bridge in Ketchikan, Alaska, to a Hurricane Katrina-damaged bridge in Louisiana. It made no mention of Palin, who at the time, hadn't yet been elected.

Nearly three years later, Utt’s paper had become one of the most popular pages on the website -- all because of its excellent rank in the Google search results. If you don't think Google is shaping people's first impressions, think again.

Search-engine traffic began to increase the day Palin was picked, but the real spike happened Wednesday night when she mentioned the Bridge to Nowhere in her acceptance speech:

I told the Congress "thanks, but no thanks," for that Bridge to Nowhere.

If our state wanted a bridge, we'd build it ourselves

Inquiring minds clearly wanted to know what this Bridge to Nowhere was all about. The fact they were reading a paper written by the Heritage Foundation, as opposed to the New York Times, certainly bodes well for the right.

More than 95% of the people entering Heritage.org were new visitors. The average time spent on the Utt paper was more than 4 minutes, indicating people probably read most of it.

Palin’s popularity in online searches has been documented by Sarah Lai Stirland and Nate Silver. And fortunately, as the above example demonstrates, people are looking for information beyond the "Sarah Palin Bikini Photos."