Heres What Americans Were Googling During The GOP Debates

Primary debates typically suffer from low ratings, but Thursday night's showdown for the top 10 Republican contenders was expected to buck tradition . An analysis of Google’s search trends -- the web giant’s data source that counts all searches from google.com globally -- indicates this might have happened.

More people in the United States were looking up the Republican Party and businessman Donald Trump on Thursday night than other top trending topics. Among the candidates, Trump and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina -- who participated in (and is considered to have won ) the bottom seven candidates' debate at 5 p.m. -- dominated search traffic for most of the evening. All times mentioned refer to Eastern time. 

Debate-related searches accounted for a lot of web traffic, but competed with searches relating to the rumored top-secret wedding  of actress Jennifer Aniston and actor Justin Theroux that reportedly took place Wednesday night. Leading up to the main debate at 9 p.m., their combined searches were generally more popular than Trump or the Republican Party. Fiorina, however, occasionally generated more searches than the Hollywood power couple, and at 8 p.m., Trump became a more heavily searched name for the rest of the night. 

Amy Schumer was also high on Google ’s list of trending topics during the debate, but searches for her name fell far below the volume for Trump and Fiorina.

So what might have been more popular than the Republican Party or the top-searched debated participants? In a completely unscientific manner (whatever popular topics came to mind), we looked at subjects we expected to have higher search volumes than the debate or its participants.   

Facebook has a consistently high search volume, and Thursday night was no different. Searches for the social media site easily surpassed debate-related topics all night. Searches for Facebook could have been in part related to the debate -- the site was a co-sponsor and provided a forum for suggesting questions to Fox News -- but its overall high search rate indicates the debate wasn't driving most of these searches.

Searches for Google itself were also popular, although searching for the Republican Party at one point eclipsed it. The Republican Party was also more heavily searched than porn for about two hours. None of the candidates achieved that feat.

What we don’t know from Google Trends data is why people searched for these topics. It’s entirely possible that some of the searches for Trump, Fiorina and the Republican Party were unrelated to the debate. We also don’t know what proportion of total Google searches the debate topics account for, only their popularity relative to other search topics -- but we can determine that for a few hours last night, politics trumped pop culture. 

Also on HuffPost: