Google's Politics and Elections blog
just posted a big finding. At its height earlier this month, online interest in Occupy Wall Street was higher than the all-time peak of online interest in the tea party back in April of 2009:
Search interest for [Occupy Wall Street] jumped ahead of the [Tea Party] on September 24, and hasn’t looked back. In a historical context, when viewing the snapshot of their nascent birth, we can see the peak of [Occupy Wall Street] has slightly more interest in American than searches for the [Tea Party] did during the groups peak in 2009.
In other words, the tea party never generated the level of organic interest online that Occupy Wall Street has generated. Ever.
Further, Google might be understating the degree to which online interest in Occupy Wall Street surpassed online interest in the tea party. According to their long-term trends chart found here, interest in the tea party was only 62 percent of that for Occupy Wall Street at their respective peaks.
The tea party has never lost its hold on the media, however:
Despite big leads in polls and search traffic for Occupy Wall Street, it is almost in a dead heat with the Tea Party for the volume of news coverage. Using Advanced Search in Google News we found that between October 7 and last week, Occupy Wall Street only barely bests the Tea Party when we examine the number of news pieces covering each movement: 29,000 to 22,000.
Given that the 1 percent owns most major news outlets, that isn't very surprising.