DISQUS

Markus · 3 years ago

I don't think i'm out to lunch... What google and others record are peoples intentions, thats is why adwords is a mega billion dollar industry. When people search for things like "buy new homes cityname " or virtual tours cityname it shows they have a strong intention of buying a home. If searches for amazon.com go up it shows that people are buying more goods or products from amazon as traffic is up. Sites like hitwise, yahoo and google can give us that information in near real time and we can see how those searches have been trending in order to figure out how well the company is doing.

I believe data mining and applying that data to the world of finance in the form of playing options and futures is a far bigger market then the $10 billion a year that google currently makes. This kind of information is game changing.

James · 3 years ago

I agree with Markus that the biggest business Google or any large repository of search data can do is in intension. They know what people are looking for because people ask them millions of times every second.

Back in 2004 at the Web 2.0 conference someone from ComScore (I believe?) gave a presentation on the direct correlation between search volume and sales of cars. This trending worked at the macro, nation level and micro, local level and, if I remember correctly, the search volumes could predict the trailing curve of sales by about 2 weeks.

Think about it and it makes perfect sense. The search engine is the best-scaled, universal information gathering tool we've come up with as a culture. Everyone uses search engines for information gathering when they're early on in what companies call the sales funnel - when they're considering a larger number of options for purchase. Then they use the search later too, when they're closer to a decision. To have access to that trending and customer would be incredible for companies looking to influence decisions.

To be Google and have access to that trending data is immensely powerful. You could move markets with the information. Isolate certain queries from a specific area, set up some alerts for volumes and you can capitalize on the assymetry of information, if you're inside Google. This has always been the proverbial other shoe waiting to drop in the Google business model, and points to why geolocation / local is so important to them.

Mathew Ingram · 3 years ago

I agree, James. It will be interesting to see how Google makes use of some of that data and leverages that sort of forecasting power.