The remaining GOP presidential candidates participated in two debates over the weekend looking for a last-minute bump in the polls before the New Hampshire primary tomorrow. But how much did they really affect voters in New Hampshire and their awareness of the candidates?

The Google Politics & Elections team looked at Google’s internal search trends for New Hampshire to rank the candidates based on two metrics.

In the first, we compared search traffic for each of the candidates on Saturday to searches for their names on Monday during the same time period. Though there are fewer searches on weekends, we found a wide variation in the degree of search volume for each candidate. As you can see in the first graph below, Jon Huntsman saw the sharpest increase in search traffic at 50%. He was followed by Newt Gingrich (+21%), Mitt Romney (+18%), and Ron Paul (+8%). Rick Santorum was the only candidate who actually saw a decrease in search traffic (-35%).


In the second graphic, we ranked the candidates by search volume today in New Hampshire. You’ll notice that the rankings are very similar to the rankings for many of the polls conducted in the state.