There are any number of ways to measure victory in a debate — pundits grade the candidates, Frank Luntz’s focus groups weigh in, Drudge polls his vast public (and more people vote than in many states’ primaries) — but there’s also the relatively new science of measuring spontaneous online reactions like Twitter mentions and Google searches. I find these fascinating because they provide a contemporaneous behavior-based metric. While searches and mentions can be for good reasons and bad, they do say something about engagement and interest.

So what was the verdict from last night? It was a Trump/Fiorina world, with others fighting for their moments in the sun. Here’s Google Trends summary of searches — Fiorina spikes and Trump stays dominant overall:

Similarly, pre-debate, Trump was the most-searched candidate in every state. After the debate, Fiorina broke through, but Trump remained dominant:

What about Twitter? IJReview has a nice gif showing how Fiorina gradually crowded out Trump over the course of the night:

Fiorina did everything she needed to do — perhaps even outperforming her own expectations. At the same time, however, it’s hard to see Trump sliding much (if at all) after this debate. But the typical rules of debate analysis and political prediction haven’t applied to him and may never apply to him. He’s confounding experts with far more political experience than I’ll ever have. Fiorina will rise — I’m confident of that — but will she rise enough to threaten The Donald (or Ben Carson)? We shall soon see.