Who is looking into your searches?

Article Written by : SEO Tips & Infos

Internet data mining is nothing new.  But when it comes to identifying economic trends, it may be a valuable tool.  Central banks in many countries including Federal Reserve (US), Britain, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Chile and Israel consider your searches on Google for certain things including home improvement items and appliances as economic indicators.  Central banks count keyword searches to gauge consumer demand in order to do economic forecasting.  They tally search volumes against broader economic trends.  Advantage of this information is it provides central banks with more immediate data on trends compared to traditional way of collecting data after several months.

Google has been collecting data on your searches for years.  Its 23 page report, Google Trends, published in April 2009 helped to recognize home and auto sales trends in the U.S.  A paper published in Israel identified how Google data helped the country to predict an economic slowdown.

Collecting data from searches and relying on the accuracy is not fool-proof because it doesn’t include the non-technology users such as the poor and the elderly.  However, as proved by a Spanish study, sectors such as travel may use data to more accurately identify trends and everyone can benefit from it.