The good people of Iowa are heading to their caucuses tonight to declare who they think should get a chance to become the next president of the United States.
With primary season officially starting today, Google is also making a bit easier to become an informed voter by adding a couple of election-related features to its search engine.
Starting today, you can just do a search for “Donald Trump economic policies” and the search results page will show a new box that highlights Trump’s policies on everything from H-1Bs to how he plans to take jobs back from Mexico (and Japan. And China). And yes – those are Trump’s plans, so they are inevitably a bit low on detail. If you want something more substantial, you can always plug in another candidate’s name (for better or worse, there are still plenty to choose from, after all).
The widget will appear for about a dozen different topics. These include issues like gun legislation, taxes, foreign policy, education and others.
It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s Bing also offers a pretty comprehensive set of election features that, in many ways, are actually easier to use than Google’s. While Google only shows a series of quotes from a candidate, Bing ranks them according to how progressive or conservative they are using proprietary machine learning models.
Like in other years, Google will also show primary results on the search results pages as they come in (both for searches in English and Spanish). This results widget will also feature an updated count of total delegates every nominee has received to date.
If you’re a Google Now user, the company will now also remind you that it’s time to vote in your local election.