Google has been busy documenting how the 2012 Republican primary affects search results.

Newt Gringrich, for instance, experienced a huge surge in searches before winning in South Carolina. Stephen Colbert search traffic jumped ahead of all candidates after he announced his exploratory committee. And before the Iowa caucus, Iowans were searching for Ron Paul more than any other candidate.

All of this has been brought to our attention by Google's new elections dashboard and its politics blog.

On Thursday, Google continued demonstrating its relevance to the election with an infographic that shows how search traffic changed surrounding caucuses and primaries thus far. For each election event, the infographic shows polling results, election results and search traffic from the state hosting the election event.

Google search trends were almost as accurate as polls in reflecting each event's winners.







Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, sjlocke