Until very recently Rick Santorum was pretty much a nobody. His name was more likely to come up in a blog post about gay rights than on the front page of the NY Times.
Today, people are searching because he's literally front page news. This would seem to be an example of Google not keeping up with real-time events.
OTOH, in a few months or even weeks he'll probably be out of the race, so reversion to the mean seems likely.
Along with such notable somebodies as James McClure (who is currently being Google-bombed by a pickle company) and Norris Cotton (being victimized by a fluffy fiber).
The controversy over his remarks and savage neologism are what I remember about him and I was a bit of a political junkie at that time. Outside of Pennsylvania I doubt many remember much more about him.
Google's algorithm takes into account the timeliness of events. So despite his recent success, people are probably still looking up the word, rather than the person (and on a large enough scale to overcome the timeliness weighting).
If that were the case, the normalized search volume for the term would be fairly constant over time. But according to Google Trends it isn't http://www.google.com/trends?q=santorum . Further, you can see that the search traffic of other Republican presidential candidates has a similar pattern. So clearly right now, and for the past year, the vast majority of searches have been for the person rather than the supposed word.
(And nothing definite can be said about what the intent was in the time before that.)
Today, people are searching because he's literally front page news. This would seem to be an example of Google not keeping up with real-time events.
OTOH, in a few months or even weeks he'll probably be out of the race, so reversion to the mean seems likely.