Google Trends vs Market Reports: Which is More Accurate, Faster?
Google released a research paper yesterday that takes an in-depth look at Google Trends and Google Insights for Search and compares its trend results against more mainstream industry reports based on actual sales data in several different categories like auto sales and home sales. Several statistical models are explained and compared, and relative accuracy is determined for each model.
As interesting as that sounds, the crucial difference is that, for Google, the statistics have already been generated -- sometimes for weeks before actual retail numbers come out. Google's trends are much closer to the present day economic situation, meaning that analysis can be made earlier, and market turning points can be identified sooner.
All this forecasting power isn't available just to Google, either. On both the Google Insights for Search page and the Google Trends page, any query result can be downloaded as a CSV (comma separated value) format file, suitable for import into any spreadsheet or database application. If you are in the trend business, this is great news as you can immediately start using Google result datasets against other, more traditional reports.
An important point that is made at the beginning of the report is that Google Trends pulls from all Google properties using localized, anonymous search usage data. As Google Blogoscoped points out,
Whenever you search in Google, send a Gmail email, call Google's 411 service, enter something in Chrome's URL bar and so on, you're adding to the data which Google can mine for other purposes than the ones you might have been immediately thinking of.
Thinking about this can initially be a bit terrifying on a personal level, but keep in mind that all that information is boiled down into aggregate trend data, and according to Google's privacy policy, which prevents examination of individual contributions to the data except in cases of a lawsuit, and even then specifics are only kept for a short period of time.
The fact that Google is sitting on an information treasure trove is one thing. Knowing how to take advantage of that fact is another. Google goes a step further and offers their aggregate statistics for others to use, too. For example, they have a special page that just tracks flu trends across the US to help people make informed decisions on if they should get a flu shot, based on what region of the country they live in.
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Great mention Phil.
Being an analysts that scours Google data all the time, I can hardly imagine how many businesses completely ignore the massive amounts of FREE data sitting within a browser and ready for exporting.
Google's data can be compared and sliced against many other traditional reports that are found in F500 companies, yet I am aware of only a small handful that have anyone who knows how to do so.
We had more than 20 web pages with total traffic exceeding 20 mil pageview/per day and 1,5 milion unique visitors/per day. Personally I'm tracking GA of those site everyday, some time I compared them to Google trend and Alexa numbers. And found that:
Google Trend and Google Analytics number are at discrepancy. Some times GA report a double number of unique visitors compared to Google trends.
My conclusion is Google trends is vaslty inaccurate as web analytics or website comparison tools
Accuracy of data aside. Early warnings about everything!
If this isn't good, what is?
I think this kind of research should be extensively supported by government grants. As it is obvious it can have large positive impact on whole society (from disease outbreaks detection, to early economy warnings, etc.).
Unfortunately, more use we make of it, more tempting it will be to manipulate this (via botnets and similar).
bye
Andraz Tori
I'd say Google Trends is more accurate and faster than other sources.
I guess only time will tell...
It's true, Google has access to an unprecedented amount of information, in aggregate and in detail on many individuals - if they ever choose to use it ...
If they were the gubermint, there would be protests and rioting in the streets.
Which makes it kind of 0x0073 0x0063 0x0061 0x0072 0x0079
No No, No not scary, google's moto is don't be evil you can trust us, um I mean them.
Gmail and general presence info if they gave a crap about real time search."
Google tools sometimes have discrepancies :(
Google trends is a companion to Compete, Alexa, Quantcast and Comscore. We have used Google trends in compiling our directory at GHQ.com. It is an assistance to the other information available, especially when the information is conflicting. Google's underlying information base is of great assistance.