Google Trends and the Current Economic Turmoil
I stumbled on this beauty over at Google Trends the other day. I twittered it, but figured I’d follow up with a post here. The chart is the average search volume over the last 12 months for [How to File Bankruptcy].
How to File Bankruptcy on Google Trends
The slope of the chart has increased in each of the last three years. The snapshot is for just the last 12 months and has a very clear upswing for September. It’s a bit chilling.
The correlation of this data with what is happening around us is perhaps expected, but still shocking. This is all normalized data, and Google only gives us a snapshot, so it’s hard to do anything but look at it qualitatively. It is hard to say whether this search term is a leading or lagging indicator, but I can just imagine the power of prediction in mining the underlying raw data.
The geographic data Google provides is also pretty accurate in reflecting the housing crisis, with the most searches for this term coming from cities that are easy to recognize as areas hit hard by the housing slump.
Regardless of whether this is a harbinger of things to come, or just a record of what has already transpired, Google Trends remains a truly powerful tool.
A good friend of mine is convinced that the reason that Google overwhelmingly prefers Obama is that they have used their vast data mining to research who will win, and are only spending money on a clear winner.
I think it’s just because they are a bunch of liberal hippies.
October 30th, 2008 at 11:24 am
[...] and some of them bound to be punished by the coming contraction, and we all know that recession and bankruptcies are coming. More than 300 online-ad networks have cropped up over the past couple of years, making [...]