Google Trends and market reports: which content is more accurate and faster?

Google released a research report link yesterday), which provides an in-depth analysis of Google Trends and Google Search's observation of Google Insights for Search, compare the two results with the mainstream industry reports. These mainstream industry reports are obtained based on actual sales data, such as car sales and house sales data. This report compares and interprets several statistical models and obtains the relative precision of each model.

The results sound interesting. The main difference between them is that Google's data comes earlier than mainstream industry reports-sometimes weeks earlier than actual retail data. Google trends reflect the current economic situation, which means that data analysis can be performed in advance, and the turning point of the market can be identified earlier.

This prediction capability is not a private product of Google. On the Google search observation and Google Trends page, all query results can be downloaded from files in CVS format, which can be imported to workbooks or database applications. If you work in the trend industry, this is a wonderful news, you can immediately discard other traditional reports and start to use Google's ready-made data sources.

At the beginning of this article, we emphasized that Google uses regionalized anonymous search usage data. As mentioned in Google Blogoscoped

Whether you are using the Google search engine, using Gmail to send emails, or using the Google 411 voice messaging service, you can enter anything in the address bar of the Chrome browser, you will provide Google with data that can be mined, and how Google uses the data can be understood immediately.

For individuals, this was a little shocking at first, but remember that all the data is concentrated in the trend data, and according to Google's privacy policy ), except for legal proceedings, Google's Privacy Policy rejects any verification of personal contribution data. In addition, such detailed data is saved for a short period of time.

The reality is that Google has such an information treasure, and knowing how to use it is another thing. Google is far away and provides the collected data to others. For example, Google opens a special page to track the flu trends in the United States, with the help of Google information, determine whether to inject flu pre-vaccine.

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