OPINION polls can be notoriously unreliable.

But does the internet now offer an alternative, more sophisticated, more reliable, way of measuring and tracking public opinion?

The race in the United States between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Presidential nomination, provides a fascinating insight into ‘The Google Factor’.

And it may also point the way for British pollsters and political parties in the future.

As the crucial Pennsylvannia primary approaches, this detailed analysis shows how many people living in the state have searched for each candidate, via Google.

The new Google Trends product provides extremely detailed graphs, enabling any internet surfer to follow the candidate’s progress in Google searches for up to a year.

Of course, searching for someone on Google does not equal votes on polling day. It does not mean that you are going to vote for them. But it does reveal which candidate is capturing the most attention of web-surfers.

However, the social networking site, Digg, does reveal the popularity of the candidates. The superb analysis, by David from MyFeedPortal.com, reveals that Obama has 13,516 “friends” on Digg, while Clinton has just 1,693.

The analysis show that Facebook too, offers a way to measure the popularity of candidates – by the number of supporters they have:

Hillary Clinton’s Facebook has 128,568 supporters http://www.facebook.com/hillaryclinton, while Barack Obama’s Facebook has 667,072 supporters (http://www.facebook.com/barackobama). To say nothing of the individual Facebook groups which those supporters may belong to.

Similar figures are also available for MySpace.

And so it goes on – to the number of clicks on each candidate’s web site, the demographics of visitors, the number of links each site has, and their page rankings.

So will the next General Election show us how many clicks Gordon Brown has had on Google, compared to David Cameron? Very probably.

It demonstrates the impact that the internet may have on how we interact and relate to political candidates and parties.

Of course, those people who are not web surfers or web-savvy, may find themselves feeling slightly alienated from the political process.

And that, at least, may not be a new phenomenon.