Sponsored Search for Political Campaigning during the 2008 US Elections

We have collected a set of 1131 textual ads that appeared in the Google Search results when searching for a candidate name running in the 2008 US Congressional elections. We have categorized the advertisers in four different categories: commercial, partisan, non-affiliated, and media. By analyzing the content of the collected ads, we discovered that the majority of them (63%) are commercial ads that have no political message, while the partisan group contributed only 14% of the ads. Furthermore, only 21 out of 124 monitored candidates were actively participating in sponsored search, by providing their own political message. We describe the different ways in which the advertisements were used and several problems that damage the quality of sponsored search, providing some suggestions to avoid such issues in the future.