Searchyogi

I use Google Trends for understanding the popularity of a wide variety of phenomena. For example, it’s a good tool for getting a rough idea of relative market size. An useful tool. So its not surprising that Google has harnessed all that search query data and understand the data correlation with US economic indices. Google has now launched Google domestic trends that makes it possible for Google Finance users to use this data in making financial/economic predictions around company and US country data (See Techcrunch’s coverage on the topic here).This is one of the more interesting finance/economics projects to come out of Google since Hal Varian (former professor of Economics at Berkeley) joined them.

Now that this data is available in an indexed format to investors at Google Finance, it would be interesting to see if this kind of data will become integral part of the prediction models used by Industry analysts.