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Uh oh. Even Google searches don't think Romney can win in 2012.

Search Engine Land tries to get to the bottom of why, when you try to enter the phrase "Romney can win" into Google, the site tries to correct you into searching for "Romney can't win."

The suggestions themselves are based on what people are searching for. For “romney can’t win” to appear, Google should be seeing a substantial number of people searching for that topic.

Interestingly, however, I can’t find that this term is popular enough to even register when using the Google Insights tool, which reports on the popularity of search topics at Google. When I tried searching for either phrase, no data was reported.

I also tried a check using another Google tool, the AdWords Keyword Research Tool. In that case, it reported that “can” searches happened, on average over the past 12 months, 590 times per month versus “can’t” searches at 110 times per month.

 

So if “can” searches beat “can’t” searches 5 to 1, why is Google’s suggestion tool — which is based on popular searches — suggesting the opposite?

There’s a very slight chance that someone generated enough queries purposely to trigger that suggestion. It’s possible, and some anti-Romney force might be clever enough to do this.

Much more likely, there’s been a recent upswing in searches for “romney can’t win” — most likely caused by attention to the spelling correction.

That’s especially supported by the fact that Bing doesn’t offer a similar suggestion. That indicates not many people are searching for “romney can’t win” at Bing — and since it doesn’t have a funny correction as Google does, they really wouldn’t be doing many search for that there.