Barack Obama v. John McCain, the battle online

August 5, 4:25 PMChicago Politics ExaminerMichael Van Winkle

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Forget the polls. There is a new metirc to consider when judging the strength of presidential campaigns: web presence. It is a dose of dramatic irony that Obama is literally beating the pants off the man who eight years ago broke new ground in online campaigning. The Maverick McCain in 2000 beat the establishment candidate in New Hampshire through a combination of town hall meetings and aggressive email campaigning. Of course, his efforts would soon be eclipsed by Howard Dean who truly brought the internet to presidential politics. But McCain's crew should be given their due for laying the ground work.

No longer though. Obama is trouncing McCain when it comes to his online presence. Take a look at these charts from Google Trends. The first compares the two candidates' official web sites by unique visitors:

The next chart compares how often the candidate's name is searched.

Of course, Google isn't the only metric that counts. But it gets worse when you look at Alexa:

Now, no election to date has ever turned on web presence and it will likely to be years before any election does. But every year it becomes more and more important, for sure.