Google just schooled every media and digital company trying to give an overview of Indian election. It has introduced a Know Your Candidate tool on the election page it had launched in November 2013 that lets you find out who the candidates are in each constituency, their declared assets, education level, social media accounts, website, age and political alliance. The tools is built around Google Maps and it lets you click on each constituency to see list of all candidates and their details. It lets you search for your constituency by pincode, but it does not let you search by candidate names as of now. Also, information seems to be limited to constituencies that are heading to polls in the next week, so most constituencies only display the details of incumbent politicians. The search giant has sourced its information from Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), PRS Legislative Research and Liberty Institute India. It needs to be noted that Facebook had tied-up with ADR to provide similar Know Your Neta service via USSD in November. It is surprising that the social network did not bother to integrate the same information when it launched election tracker last month. Google also mentioned that it will be integrating candidate bios being produced by Ping Network’s YouTube channel MeraCandidate. It is not clear if Google plans to integrate Hangout videos it has of politicians in this tool. What should Google do next: Google has drastically improved its election page since it launched with just a news and videos…
