Google Consumer Surveys help to analyze voter preferences, while Google products serve up voter-information queries

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Google just gave itself a pat on the back by detailing how Google Consumer Surveys efficiently polls anonymous web users and helps to analyze voter preferences.

“So how’d you all do in your first election with us?” wrote Googler Brett Slatkin on the official Google Politics blog, “Pretty spectacularly.”

FiveThiryEight’s Nate Silver, a media-dubbed “high priest” of polling, called Google Consumer Surveys the “No. 1 most accurate poll online and the No. 2 most accurate poll overall,” according to Slatkin, while the Pew Research Center said Google’s surveys will “likely be an important addition to the research tool kit available to pollsters.”

The surveys run across the web and subsequently earn websites money for showing them, and web surfers can then anonymously submit their responses, and the cropped data gives publishers, such as Texas Tribune, Denver Post, etc., as well as political campaigns, academics, start-ups, and marketers, detailed research to better improve their products.

In related news, Google does more than collect data; the Internet giant also supplies it. Eric Hysen, of the Google Politics and Elections team, said the search engine saw “unprecedented digital engagement in this election on Google and across the web” during the 2012 U.S. Elections.

Google’s products, such as Voter Information Tool and the Civic Information API, helped serve over 23 million voter-information queries. Over 100 developers, like AT&T, built apps using the Civic Information API, while more than 600 websites, including both the Democratic and Republican Congressional Campaign Committees, embedded Google’s Voter Information Tool.

“We’re thrilled to have been able to help millions of Americans find the information they needed to vote, both on Google and across the web,” wrote Hysen on the official Google Politics blog. “Now we’re off to do the same in other countries like Ghana’s elections next month and the Czech Republic, Italy, and Kenya next year.”

Get more information on the official Google Politics blog.