Google Trends Just Lovin' It Some Donald Trump

Don't look for Tim Pawlenty or Rand Paul or Michele Bachmann. Not there. Not even close.

But Donald Trump? Maybe.

The Donald -- real estate mogul, reality TV celeb, network news interviewee -- could become the first presidential hopeful to place in a Google trends' daily Top 5 on a regular basis.

He just keeps doing things to get searched and clicked.

In this new media, search-engine-optimized world, apparently you need a lot more than relevance and a desire to present your case for the White House to make people want to bring you up on their computers. You need what Donald Trump has -- mouth, money, celebrity and a gimmick that fascinates hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of people.

Trump is a birther-baiter. That's his gimmick. He questions Obama's citizenship and he brings out a cacophony of clickers who plain don't believe the president was born in Hawaii, no matter how many times his U.S. birth certificate gets waved under a TV camera.

A story in Wednesday's USA Today quotes a number of knowledgeable sources, from Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy to the Poynter Institute's Al Tomkins in St. Petersburg. All try to explain the Trump search engine phenomenon.

"He's good copy," Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, tells USA Today. "There's an unspoken collusion between journalists who are happy to have someone like this to sell papers and increase clicks and Trump happy to raise his image, which he leverages to make more money."
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