Fightin' words: What Web users searched and said during the debates

If you're tired of the election season, you "don't want to hear another word about it." The rest of the country, however, had words of its own to get out during the recent debates.

Google, which rarely misses a chance to show off a nifty search, has been tracking the popular search terms during the McCain-Obama face-offs and the Biden-Palin match. The site's Google Trends function doesn't offer sufficiently granular results as to see moment-to-moment trends (at least not to those of us outside the Googleplex), but the keepers of the official Google blog favored the Web with some stats.

The gold ring of Wednesday's debate was Joe the Plumber -- specifically, the identity of the person who turned out to be Ohio contractor Samuel "Joe" Wurzelbacher. The search for the high-profile handyman spiked early and ended the evening with the greatest sustained level of interest. Chicagoland professor Bill Ayers and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) attracted a bit of interest as well -- perhaps more than more candidate would have wished, perhaps less than the other one would have hoped for.

The two topics garnering the most interest were abortion and education, with "Roe vs Wade" and "charters + vouchers" getting tremendous attention at the 60- and 80-minute marks respectively. By way of comparison, the second debate attracted the most interest in "walk softly" and, early on, "Whitman + Buffett" (entrepreneurs Meg W. and Warren B., both mentioned as potential candidates for Secretary of the Treasury). "Nuclear" and "genocide" rounded out that town hall-style debate.

That's what people searched; over at Twitter, where they're tracking election-related chatter in a special Election 2008 feed, the things they said were somewhat different. Twitter hasn't revealed the most popular terms from the last debate, but in the second debate, the words "tax," "nuclear," "Health care," and -- most often and and most abruptly -- "that one" lit up the boards. (As for "Joe the Plumber," it's most interesting to note that by the end of the debate, there were at least two fake Joe-the-Plumbers on the service.)

"That one" also had a lively afterlife the next day, with variations on the phrase aired for the most part by Twitter users doing variations on "I'm voting for..." The Twitter-trend monitor Twist, on the other hand, notes that during the debate, users twittered the word "mccain" over 15,000 times, more than references to "barack" and "obama" combined.

Yahoo's Flickr, meanwhile, provided the most amusing insight as to how we're thinking about the campaigns at this point. Over the last two days, the most popular (and most remixed) campaign-related image is a candid snap taken near the end of the Wednesday debate, with both candidates onscreen (but one making a most peculiar face). Perhaps the takeaway from all this is that if a picture's worth 1,000 words, a picture when we're all but floating in words is a great way to end the week.