Healthcare Campaign Losing Steam

Recently Obama appeared on several Sunday morning talk shows in an effort to push healthcare reform.  It's been a few weeks now and I'm curious to see if it has had any effect on the interest of Americans.  So I turned to Google to gather some aggregated internet search data.  It's fairly effective to utilize Google data in determining public interest.  Below is a chart based on Google search data regarding four of the top issues facing Americans today.  This was eye opening to me.  I'll explain...but first, the chart: Right Click the frame to open in a new window or tab. For some reason Blogger is not showing the whole frame.




The results I found were nothing short of surprising. I would expect there to be a relatively higher amount of traffic around healthcare related searches. But over the last 30 days (since Obama's re-dedication to healthcare reform) public interest has been on a steady decline. In fact, the aggregated data indicate that there is more public interest surrounding the issues relating to Iran than there is interest in healthcare issues.

There are some disclaimers that need to be made. For example, this research doesn't differentiate between negative and positive searches. It only aggregates all searches around the term healthcare. I was able to filter the data to include only those searches relating to news and current events. This filters out searches around terms like "healthcare insurance" or "capital of Iran." However, this isn't all too important because I'm only trying to gauge public awareness of issues. Google search data is the best gauge because the majority of Americans now get news and information from the internet and conduct research through Google.

What do you think? Is this surprising?