Sharing Data with Researchers on European Parliament Elections

We are glad to announce that we have compiled a dataset of European Parliament (‘EU’) election 2024 related queries in different EU languages to support transparency and engagement with the researcher community. Researchers can apply using this form. Requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

In this article we provide some high-level insights into the user behaviors in Bing search related to the ‘EU elections’ that can be drawn from search data.

An illustrative analysis of search data on EU elections

For the sake of this particular blog post, we selected data from Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Poland for further review. [Note that the datasets available under request contain data from additional EU countries and languages as well.]

Daily data was extracted from May 1, 2024, to June 10, 2024, focusing on queries with over 50 occurrences.This period covers both the lead-up to the European Parliament elections [June 6-9, 2024] and the immediate aftermath, allowing us to capture trends over time.

The data extraction techniques included:

• Compiling a list of phrases and keywords related to the EU Parliament elections and extracting the queries that contained these terms.
• Identifying queries that led to clicks on the official EU voting information domain (https://elections.europa.eu/) and using similar methods to gather additional relevant queries.

These queries were then categorized into specific themes such as Voting Information, Results, Generic Search, Navigational Search, Candidates and Parties, and Other, using LLM. The definitions are provided in the table below. While other categorizations could be used as well, we followed this logic to provide an easy to explain analysis.

 

Category	Definition
Voting Information	The user seeks details on voting procedures, such as proxy voting, mail-in ballots, and other related voting queries.
Result	The individual is inquiring about the election outcomes or the projected results.
Generic Search	The user is inquiring about EU elections without focusing on a particular subject, such as "EU elections 2024" or "European elections 2024."
Navigational Search	When the user directly searches for a website domain
Candidates and Parties	The user is looking for details about the candidates or parties list.
Other	Anything that is not related to the categories above

 

What the analysis shows about search intent over time

We examined the proportion of each category over the given time frame as illustrated in the figure below. It is evident that the attention on Voting Information increased significantly from May 15 until June 8, 2024.

Additionally, there are noticeable peaks in Results related queries leading up to the election due to assumed user interest in the result forecast. A dramatic rise is observed after June 9, which marks the final election day.

Throughout the entire period, the two most searched categories by users are Candidates and Parties, along with Voting Information.

Bing is committed to continued engagement with the research society and welcomes eligible organizations’ requests to access available datasets under the Bing Qualified Researcher Program.