And in her first two days in the national spotlight, U.S. Internet searches on all things Palin — her photos, her biography, her family, anything — outnumbered any other politician in the last three years, saysHitwise.com, which also monitors Web data. In many cases, her name was searched alongside the word “hot.”

Bill Tancer, Hitwise’s general manager of research, says that on the Richter scale of online search activity, Palin registered a magnitude 10. Tancer, author of “Click: What Millions do Online and Why it Matters,” told The Trail: “The reaction to her, in such a short period of time, has been nothing like we’ve seen before.”