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Where Do I Vote? Google’s Election Day Doodle Answers That Question With Polling Place Lookup Box

You may be wondering, “Where do I vote?” Google knows this question is on many people’s minds across the United States today as the midterm elections are underway. Google is taking t...
Where Do I Vote? Google’s Election Day Doodle Answers That Question With Polling Place Lookup Box
Written by Chris Crum
  • You may be wondering, “Where do I vote?” Google knows this question is on many people’s minds across the United States today as the midterm elections are underway.

    Google is taking the opportunity to turn its homepage into a tool for would be voters, who may not know exactly where they need to go. Rather than making the doodle take you to search results for “Election Day,” which is a format Google often employs for holiday doodles, it takes you to a query for “Where do I vote?”

    That query doesn’t just bring up a classic search results page with ten blue links (fewer and fewer queries do these days as it is). Instead, Google gives you a search box right at the top for a “Polling Place Lookup,” which lets you enter your address and find the proper venue.

    Strangely, if you simply search for “polling place lookup,” Google doesn’t deliver this box, but lists a page from vote411.org. This is presumably the website Google would have traditionally taken users to before it decided it had to start injecting its own services and answers into as many search results as possible.

    In fact, for the “Where do I vote?” query, Google lists a handful of local results after the search box, followed by several “in the news” results. Then, the vote44.org result appears.

    Site owners are often distressed when they see Google placing its own stuff in the search results rather than sending them the traffic, but in this case, provided its supplying accurate information to users (it did for me), it’s probably fine. People need to know where to vote, and if Google can get them that info faster, then that sounds good to me.

    Images via Google

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