Tracy Sherlock
Sun
People can now put their finger on the pulse of the economy almost immediately, using a data-analysis tool developed by Google.
Google Search Insights can predict everything from layoffs to travel trends, and Google is giving it away, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian told The Vancouver Sun Tuesday.
Varian was in Vancouver giving a speech at the Joint Statistical Meetings conference, which brings together more than 5,000 statisticians from academia, government and industry.
The tool uses “now-casting,” Varian said, which is like an instantaneous, involuntary poll about whatever people are searching for at any given time.
“It’s a lot of fun. And it has all of these applications in politics, economics and sociology,” Varian said.
Making predictions using real-time information is useful for individuals as well as businesses.
“For example, if there’s a rumour going around that there’s going to be layoffs, the first thing people will do is search for information about unemployment — unemployment rates, or where the unemployment office is,” Varian said. “It’s not too surprising that the unemployment rate is quite heavily correlated with these searches.”
The possibilities for applying the information to marketing are limitless, Varian said. Companies can test market products and advertising campaigns, and can see the impact of news stories on the number of web searches for their product or service.
The analysis tool serves to fulfil Google’s mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Varian started working for the search engine in 2002, and he says everyone there thought they were onto something big.
“[The founders] thought big, and they realized it was going to be a phenomenon, but I don’t think anybody appreciated just how successful Google would be,” Varian said. “[Google] built a data infrastructure that’s really quite incredible, then they turned a bunch of engineers loose on that data.”
Thanks at least in part to the popularity of Google, the sheer volume of data in the world has exploded, creating a huge need for statisticians.
“There’s really a desperate need for people who are trained in analyzing that data. A great thing in a profession is to be complementary to something that is ubiquitous and cheap,” said Varian, who is known as the man who called statistics the “sexy job” of the next decade.
Varian said he thinks the next big thing will be mobile advertising and applications, as well as enterprise software for micro-multinational businesses.
The automatically generated data can be searched by category, geography and by related searches. Check out Google Search Insights at www.google.com/insights/search.
The statistical conference runs until Thursday at the Vancouver Convention Centre and is open to the public with special pricing for students, seniors and teachers. More information is available at www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2010.
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