WEBS of political connections could be revealed by a few simple Google searches.
Sang Hoon Lee at Korea鈥檚 in Daejeon wanted to see how search engines could highlight relationships, so opted to study the 100 US senators in Congress in 2006. He used Google to search for web pages listing pairs of senators鈥� names and used the number of results to weight the strength of the relationship.
This data was used to draw up a 鈥渞elationship map鈥� of senators in the run-up to the 2006 Senate elections. Defeated presidential candidate John Kerry was the Democrat most linked to, while John McCain was the most linked to Republican. The results, says Lee, show that simple analyses can reveal real-world links (PloS One, ).
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