According to the opinion polls, the Liberal Democrats have been riding high on a wave of new-found popularity after Nick Clegg’s performance on the first ever live TV debate.

A great way to gauge popularity is to use Google Insights for Search, a tool we use all the time to help our clients research their market and discover new ones. This time we thought we’d use it to take a look at search trends around the political parties and their manifestos.

Let’s look at the Big 3..

You can see a clear surge after the live TV debate. There were also searches for “Lib Dems” & “Tories”…

They say personality is important in politics, so how did the leaders do?

Nick Clegg, the Lib Dems and their manifesto generated thousands of queries as people searched for ‘Liberal Democrat manifesto 2010′. Searches for David Cameron and the Conservatives topped searches for PM Gordon Brown and the Labour party, although both parties’ policies and manifestos generated a similar number of searches.

Interestingly, throughout the debate all three party leaders made references to a particular policy, term or event which generated thousands of queries, including David Cameron’s reference to “quangos”.

Could this be an early indicator on how the votes will go? I for one will be keeping a close eye on the web trends in the run up to May 6th.