What Americans want to know about 2016 candidates

When most Americans are looking for answers, most of them - about 64 percent, according to comScore - turn to Google. And when it comes to questions about the field of 2016 presidential candidates, they really want to know two things: How old are the candidates? And how tall are they?

Google tracks the top questions users ask about each of the presidential candidates. For every single candidate running for president in 2016 - all 17 Republicans and five Democrats - the question, "How old is [candidate]?" ranks among the top five.

A close second is the question, "How tall is [candidate]?" although it tends to be a more common query about Republicans than Democrats. That was among the top five questions for 13 Republicans, but just one Democrat (Hillary Clinton).

The age question can be a marker of potential health or memory problems, presidential historian and Princeton University Professor Julian Zelizer told CBS News. "Some of the electorate will want to know more carefully how will they be able to govern," he said.

For some people, age can shed light on what a presidential candidate has lived through.

The height question, on the other hand, says little about a candidate's fitness to govern - although some researchers say it indicates an evolutionary preference for greater physical presence that dates back to the days when people might have to protect their resources through sheer strength.

"Although it may seem irrational in the modern context, we may prefer taller leaders because our ancestors who selected more formidable allies (height is a common cue for physical formidability) were more likely to survive and pass on related genes in their violent environment," Gregg Murray, a political science professor at Texas Tech University, wrote in the "Caveman Politics" blog at Psychology Today.

Murray, who has studied the links between height and politics, also found in a recent study that individuals tend to prefer taller leaders when they are facing threats.

"When there's a condition of war they were more likely to say they wanted a leader with greater physical formidability, in particular weight and [body mass index]," he told CBS News. Leaders "are the ones we expect to lead the fight and to scare off potential competitors or invaders...that may be challenging us for our resources and our nationhood."

Other research he has conducted found that people who are taller are much more likely to say they are interested in running for office and felt much more qualified to do so. And the broader field of research about height and leadership shows that people tend to believe taller men have more leadership qualities and physical dominance.

There has long been a myth in American politics that the taller candidate always wins elections - though that's been disproven, especially in recent elections. In 2012, Barack Obama (6'1") beat Mitt Romney (6'2"), and George Bush (6'0") beat both John Kerry (6'4") in 2004 and Al Gore (6'1") in 2000.

But the height theory isn't entirely without merit. Four Dutch professors dug into past research and the data behind height and politics, and found three things:

• Taller candidates weren't significantly more likely to win the election, but they did tend to receive more support in the popular vote (Gore won the popular vote in 2000)
• Taller presidents are more likely to be reelected
• Presidents are, on average, much taller than men who were born at the same time as them

"In different periods there are different issues that people see about representing a strong candidate, but in the modern age of the presidency where presidents campaign, they're in the public eye a lot," Zelizer told CBS News. "What someone looks like matters, and so I think these kinds of questions just reflect a very visual age of politics where again rightly or wrongly we judge how a person might be based on their appearance."

That fits with what the Dutch researchers found in their study about the height of U.S. presidents: "The chance of the taller candidate winning has tended to increase as we approach the present day," they wrote. "That is, for more recent elections, height more strongly predicts election outcome."

Beyond height and age, Googlers were often interested in candidates' marriages (neurosurgen Ben Carson, businesswoman Carly Fiorina, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont) and where they were born (Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida). They wanted to know businessman Donald Trump's net worth, whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will go to jail, and, oddly, how old Ohio Gov. John Kasich's wife is (she's 51).

And without further ado, the heights and ages of (most of) the presidential candidates: