Yahoo! Broadens and Makes Its Elections Site More User Friendly

Despite already having a very good in depth site that treats the 2008 elections very seriously, the people over at the Sunnyvale based company have chosen to open up even more to the public and bring figures in an interesting way, rather than the classic polls.

The new part of the site that was launched was dubbed "Dashboard" and it contains basic polling and funding stats for each candidate in one easy to read screen. The candidates are on their parties' respective side of the screen, the Democrats on the left and the Republicans on the right. Next to each candidate's picture there are four basic stats, as Michael Arrington notes:

1. recent polling results, based on aggregated poll averages from Real Clear Politics;
2. "buzz" which shows the relative popularity based solely on Yahoo search queries;
3. prediction market, which shows the likelihood of a candidate to win based on real world, real money bets placed at Intrade, an Irish company;
4. total money raised for each candidate.

It's fairly interesting to watch the numbers on the site compared to the polls, they are almost never the same, but the prediction markets, though, come closest to being accurate: Hillary Clinton has a 59.5 percent chance of winning, and she is currently polling at 43 percent.

Apart from the data that is being thrown at you on the front page, clicking each candidate's picture will bring the specific information and see state-by-state percentages and so on.

In case you were wondering why all the hype surrounding the elections, not taking into account the future of the presidency and so on and so forth, "a record 1 billion dollars or more will be spent this year by the various campaigns in selling their candidates", and everyone will most definitely want to get a piece of that pie.