You may have heard of Google Trends. It’s a cool tool which will show you the ups-and-downs of the public’s interest in a particular topic—at least as revealed in how often we search for it. And you may have even heard of the first really important use of this tool: Google Flu Trends, which uses search data to try to predict flu activity. Now Google has released an amazing way to reverse engineer the process: Google Correlate. Just feed in your favorite weekly time series (or cross-state comparisons), and it will tell you which search terms are most closely correlated with your data.
So I tried it out. And it works! Amazingly well.
I fed in the weekly numbers on initial unemployment claims—one of the most important weekly economic time series we have. The search term that is most closely correlated? Crikey, it’s “filing for unemployment.” Indeed, the correlation is an astounding 0.91.
The amount of information that Google can mine and compile about people is absolutely stunning. They are like a private NSA. And I'm feeding them over 1000 posts of information for nothing.
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