> To conclude, I didn't get very far in understanding what the
> population of U.S. internet users consider to be socialism.
>
I don't think they have much idea. That's probably why they were searching for "socialism" on Google in the first place.
My completely uninformed guess is that a lot of people have heard that "Obama is a socialist." So they started pondering whether that seemed plausible or not, only to realize they weren't really sure what socialism was in the first place. So they searched Google for "socialism" to get some idea. In that case, the important question isn't what the searcher believed about socialism beforehand, but rather the answers he or she got in the course of the search. So a good place to start would be Wikipedia's entry for socialism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist
SA