Amidst all of the head-scratching — or self-flagellating, as I like to call it — following pollsters’ erroneous predictions in New Hampshire is a sign that the web may have had it right all along.

Yahoo! has released some Buzz data that shows that Hillary Clinton’s “Buzz Score” — “the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read” — went up and up in the runup to the New Hampshire primary. At the same time, Barack Obama’s score spiked downward.

In addition, the fine folks at Yahoo! report that on the day of the New Hampshire primary Clinton’s Buzz Score among New Hampshire women spiked on primary day. (It’s scary that they know this information so precisely).

Obama originally led in searches among voters age 45 and older, but by primary day Clinton had a 15% lead over Obama.

The Buzz Scores for the winners of the Iowa caucuses were also high, though Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee had the highest scores, yet Paul came in 5th in Iowa.

Also, there’s the small problem of John McCain, who isn’t mentioned in Yahoo’s release.

Nevertheless, if the pollsters and pundits were paying close attention to Clinton and Obama’s Buzz Scores as the voters went to the polls in New Hampshire, the results may not have been such a surprise.

This data has interesting implications: when predicting election results, are the online behaviors of voters more reliable that traditional polling methods? Remember that data from Hitwise and Compete both showed Obama gaining traction online before his Iowa caucus victory.