From The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada
Google eyes trends as economic indicators
By Tavia Grant
Move over, Statistics Canada and U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics. There’s a new kid on the block.
Google Inc. has a research project under way to use its mammoth database to start a “Google Price Index,” a real-time measure of inflation.
The concept was discussed by the company’s chief economist Hal Varian at a weekend conference of the U.S. National Association for Business Economics.
It comes as Google is expanding its analysis to examine how trends on the world’s largest search engine might also be economic indicators....
In a paper last year, Mr. Varian said Google’s trends data can help improve forecasts of the current level of activity for several different economic time series, including automobile sales, home sales, retail sales, and travel behaviour. And searches for “unemployment insurance” might help predict unemployment insurance claims, or the unemployment rate.
Mr. Varian joined Google in 2002 and is also an emeritus professor [actually, a full professor on leave] at [the School of Information at] the University of California, Berkeley.