From The Economist
Measuring economic sentiment: Falling BRICs
A MAN only thinks of the dentist when he has a toothache, observed Keynes, and only considers the economy when it too is painful. By that standard, as signs mount of wobbles in the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China), what are the sentiments of the people themselves?
To answer that question, Graphic detail has turned to Google Insight, the statistical tool by which one can see the relative changes in specific search queries over time (and can break it down by locations, time, etc). The correlations are utterly unscientific: they simply gauge searches; the rest is one's interpretation.
In his lectures describing Google Insight (such as at the University of California, Berkeley [DataEDGE Conference] last June), Hal Varian, the firm's chief economist, notes that the data are not raw query counts but a "normalized query share"—that is, a fraction of queries relative to the total number of queries, placed on a scale to 100....