San Francisco  - Sarah Palin has taken the political world by storm since she was named the running mate of Republican presidential candidate John McCain last month. Now comes evidence that she's also sparking record interest in the online world.

According to online tracking firm Hitwise, "Sarah Palin" was the most searched-for political term, accounting for 2 per cent of all political searches in the four weeks ending September 6, the Saturday after the Republican National Convention. At that time, the previously-unknown Palin had been in the national headlines for only eight days.

The second highest search term was "Barack Obama," with 1.9 percent of political searches. The candidate's last name alone ranked fourth in search requests. "John McCain" ranked fifth and "McCain" ranked 10th in the top political search terms list.

Hitwise also said the Palin factor has helped the McCain campaign close the "web gap" with Barack Obama, whittling down a 60-point (80 per cent to 20 per cent) difference in July between searches for McCain's Web site versus Obama's, to just 12 percentage points (56 per cent to 44 per cent).

In a separate study by online metric site Compete. com more than 1.1 million people read the Alaska governor's Wikipedia article within the first 36 hours following her introduction as McCain's running mate, making it the most popular on the site in the month of August. Michael Phelps, the 14-time Olympic gold medalist, placed second.

YouTube has also been flooded with Palin-related videos and there are now approximately 130,000 such clips on the site, compared to just 300 Palin videos on the site prior to her nomination. (dpa)