As voters began to go to the polls to elect a new European Parliament, we thought it would be interesting to use some of advanced tools to capture the vote's trends. By deploying our public tool Insights for Search, we wer, we were able to compare the searching patterns of millions of Brits, French, German, Italians and Poles and compute how interest in a topic changes over time. In each country, we looked at the search for political parties in the run up to the election.

The results were fascinating. While many ruling parties showed surprising resilience, the searches underlined how non-traditional and often anti-European parties have gained ground. The UK presents a striking example. Interest in both Labour and the Conservatives stagnated, while smaller parties like the Greens and UK Independence party surged ahead in the wake of the MPs expenses scandal.

A word of caution is in order. It is possible to slice these data in multiple ways. People use a variety of different forms of shorthand when they search, and political parties are no different. The search queries compared here represent the least ambiguous versions of searching for a given party--BNP is a bank in addition to a party, of course, but the Greens share their name with a color and both Labour and Conservative are likewise words in their own right. In addition, there is nothing exhaustive or completely conclusive about these queries. Searches don't necessarily translate into votes.

Even so, we believe that large amounts of anonymous data provides a powerful tool for making important insights. Our Google Flu Trends allows us to predict the spread of the disease faster than public authorities and could end up saving lives. So take a moment to ruminate over the following search results taking the political pulse in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Poland.

United Kingdom

FRANCE

In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy's ruling UMP dominated searches and the Socialist Party continued to stagnate. But in the final days before the vote, the left-wing "Front de Gauche" and the right-wing "Front National" gained traction. The Greens, meanwhile, failed to gain real momentum.

GERMANY

In Germany, searches veered left. While the ruling coalition continued to dominate, junior left wing partner SPD rose faster than the Chancellor Angela Merkel's center right CDU. Centrist Free Democrats scored a strong showing and the radical left-wing Die Linke looked poised to surprise and the Greens showing a strong performance.

Italy

Italians seemed to favor the left wing PD and IDV formations over Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's ruling PDL People of Freedom. Little change was visible over the final month of campaigning.

POLAND

Poles turned first to Prime Minister Donald Tusk's Civic Platform. But a surprising number searched for anti-European, nationalist party Libertas, which was born out of the Irish No vote against the Lisbon Treaty.

Posted by Bill Echikson, Senior Manager, Communications

The 1957 Treaty of Rome established the four freedoms - the free movement of persons; the free movement of goods; the free movement of services; and the free movement of capital.

These initial four freedoms reflected the needs of the prevailing industrial economy and helped spur the creation of the 1992 single market project. Today, we are on the path to create a knowledge-based economy. Europe's heads of states acknowledged this shift in 2000 when they launched the Lisbon Agenda for growth and jobs. Now, it is time for the European Union to add a Fifth Freedom to meet the needs of the knowledge economy.

A constructive and creative debate has opened about the meaning of the fifth freedom. In a speech given in April, 2007, Science & Research Commissioner Janez Potočnik emphasised the importance of the European dimension to research. Later that year, the European Commission published a new strategic report, adding high speed Internet and innovation coordination. Last year Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding published a Communication on the Future of the Internet, which put openness at the heart of her future Fifth Freedom agenda.

For Google, Europe's Fifth Freedom should mean freedom of knowledge to enable collaboration and strengthen community, not only to drive jobs and growth but also, for example, to address climate change and to modernise our democracies.

We've been discussing our first thoughts on the Fifth Freedom with policy makers over the last few weeks. Their suggestions have helped us refine our analysis. Among the things we now suggest is testing new innovation mechanisms, like awards and public procurement, prioritising opening up and mapping information that can fuel innovation in Green ICTs and re-thinking the barriers to entrepreneurship - collaboratively - with entrepreneurs in the driver's seat.

Collaborative innovation should also be the cornerstone of public policy. Today, we are making our revised contribution - version 1.5 - available. We would be delighted to receive your comments, as we continue to develop this document over time.

This is not the last you will hear from us on the subject. We plan to blog about these issues over the coming months and will continue to discuss our vision.

Posted by Dr Nicklas Lundblad, European Policy Manager and Simon Hampton, Director of Public Policy