The Internet didn’t break yesterday, and if there was ever a day for that to happen it was Election Day 2008 in America. Akamai’s Net Usage Index for News recorded the highest number of website visitors per minute in history, placing Barack Obama’s historic win at the top at the chart.
The Internet logged 8,572,042 visitors per minute as of 11:00 PM Tuesday, November 4, 2008, the moment Obama was declared the winner. The previous peak, 7,283,584 visitors per minute, had been held since June 22, 2006, win the US lost to Ghana in the World Cup.
Throughout the campaigns, television remained the dominant source for news, according to Pew Internet, but the percentage of people who say they got most of their news from the Internet increased from 10 percent in 2004 to 33 percent in 2008. That was up from 26 percent in March of this year, while television and newspaper consumption remained flat. Any bets on how far past 50 percent Internet will shoot in 2012?
Luckily for those Internet consumers, the behind-the-scenes heroes of IT were prepared for the onrush. Hosting companies increased new hardware and load-balancing services, while political sites like DailyKos beefed up their backend in advance.
Looks like it worked because, aside from Cogent’s little spat with Spint (wonder how much that affected political traffic?), the Internet was thriving under one heckuva traffic test.
The Google Blog put together a nice list of what all those people were looking for in advance of heading to the polls. Interesting to see Chuck Norris take his place between Joe Biden and Cindy McCain. Also interesting was to see a large number of people boning up on the tenets of socialism, perhaps to measure official definitions against the Republican definition.
Here are a few of those top ten search gainers from yesterday: 
Top Political Personas
Obama
Palin
McCain
Tina Fey
Joe Biden
Chuck Norris
Cindy McCain
Bristol Palin
SNL Palin
Colin Powell
Top Political Topics
debate
Social Security
presidential debate
polls
voter registration
gas prices
oil prices
FDIC
electoral college
Socialism
Top Political News Sources
Drudge
Huffington Post
Gallup
Real Clear Politics
Rasmussen
Rush Limbaugh
Politico
538
CNN Politics
Daily Kos
