| Supernatural Google? | ||
| Google’s rise to search engine dominance has certainly been impressive. With their latest applications, “Google Trends” and “Google Insights for Search”, Google sets out to use the collective knowledge from the world’s combined search strings to predict the future. The line of thought is that if the number of people searching for a particular car make rises, then the sales of that car make will increase in the following period. Key persons: We have seen the worst The Chairman of the US Federal Reserve says it. Numerous economists say it. In our poll earlier this year, you said it. Growth rates returning to major economies in mainland Europe and in Asia indicate it. We have now seen the worst of this financial crisis. However, in the last couple of years, predictions have been plenty, and many of them have been imprecise or even directly wrong. Search engine queries as a predicting force With Google Trends and Google Insights for Search, it is now possible to see the search volumes not only for any particular search term, but also for any particular time period and/or geographical location. In retrospect, it is really interesting to see how a drop in sales of a product group often is preceded by a drop in Internet search queries for that specific product group. Perhaps, it can also be used to predict larger socio-economic factors. A search for ‘layoff’ at Google Trends reveals some intriguing patterns: http://www.google.com/trends?q=layoff&date=all&geo=all&ctab=0&sort=0&sa=N First of all, the amount of searches on ‘layoff’ rose back in 1st quarter of 2008. At this point of time, very few people had envisaged the current financial crisis. It could be argued that the explosive growth in search volumes in 4th quarter of 2008 and 1st quarter this year indicated the ferocity of the financial crisis, but does the steady declining search volumes in the last couple of months then mean that the worst of this financial crisis is over? They do not provide the answers Google Trends, and its sibling, Google Insights for search do not provide answers. Even they cannot predict the future. In their white paper “Predicting the Present with Google Trends”, Google states that predictive models which include search volume variables are stronger than models, which do not. Hence, when applied carefully, they can serve as indicators, but they stop short of providing the answers. That is still left to you. Read more • Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends • Google Insights for Search: http://www.google.com/insights/search/# • “Predicting the Present with Google Trends” from Google Research Blogs: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/04/predicting-present-with-google-trends.html | ||
| Date | 05-09-2009 | |||
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Editor: Susanne Dahl, SAM Group A/S. E-mail: sd@sam-int.com. Contact SAM at +45 63 17 44 91. |
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