Judging the Economy via Search Volumes
Could Google be a way to predict trends, enough so that it could point to investments?
Its an interesting idea, introduced by Hitwise when they ask if the housing market has hit rock bottom - pointing to a levelling off of the decline in Google searches for “Houses For Sale”
Certainly looking at searches for trends for “houses for sale” in Google trends doesn’t share the level off, with a decline still shown, almost 50% down on the same time last year due to a shortage of mortgages
Also look at spending power - “DIY” is down about 30% from last year, but is experiencing an upswing in the last month.
Are people finding they do have more disposable income, or are they trying to tart up their houses as much as possible to make them easier to sell in this tough market?
But is everyone feeling the blues and booking themselves on holiday? Looks like search trends for “holiday” are on their way up.
Could you maybe let search volume govern investment choices? Indeed, could you not build a search engine that looked for company names in the vicinity of certain “buzz” works such as Buy, Sell, Good, Bad, and make a call on possible share options? I’ll tell you if it works after I make my first million 
Technorati Tags: google, trends, economy, mortgages, buy a house, blog, uk, money
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I know that this sort of data has previously been used to predict the outcome of big votes (such as general elections, X Factor winners etc) so there’s got to be something in it, although I suspect those have more defined result, which makes it easier to track.
Google Finance might be a good place to start, as they plot blog and news article on share price graphs - it might be worth looking at lesser known shares and finding those with most linked blog or news posts - that might point towards a possible movement upwards? Any thoughts?
Google Finance looks like a good resource, although no RSS feeds I can see?
I was wondering if an alternative service which let you take an RSS, then work with it via a RSS aggrgator like Yahoo Pipes would help with this, linked to maybe Technorati feeds showing mentions/trends? (an example here for Tesco)