just do our thinking for us. I mean who needs the hassle?
But seriously, one of the company's latest offerings could be boon to business people, academics and policy makers: Google Correlate, a program that searches for correlations between online search activity and actual real-world activity. The implications for health care, for economic and social policy development, for business trends and scientific research are profound. Whether we have gotten to the point in human evolution that our search activity is an accurate leading indicator of behavior is an open question. The civil liberties implications are potentially sobering; one can imagine over-zealous security services drawing unfounded implications from web search activity. On the other hand, if properly managed and monitored ("Yeah, right!" I hear all you cynics saying with justifiable sarcasm)the positive security developments are also impressive.
The implication is that as we learn more about the relationship between online and physical or tangible activity, the more we may learn about ourselves. JL
Sheila Shayon reports in Brand Channel:
"During the flu epidemic of 2008, Google noted that the "activity of certain search terms are good indicators of actual flu activity" and subsequently launched Google Flu Trends, a warning system based on the statistics.
The ten-ton penny drop: a quantifiable correlation between the search world and the real world.Although Google Trends and Google Insights for Search let users enter a search term and see a trend, feedback from the research community called for the ability to enter a real-world trend and see what search terms match, i.e., Google Trends in reverse.
So Google built Correlate, whose methodology a blog post describes as: “upload your own data series and see a list of search terms whose popularity best corresponds with that real world trend. In the example below, we uploaded official flu activity data from the U.S. CDC over the last several years and found that people search for terms like [cold or flu] in a similar pattern to actual flu rates.
You can also enter a search term and find other terms whose activity corresponds well over time with the one you’re interested in. While cell biology isn’t so popular in the summer time, continues Google, “What’s interesting is that the ups and downs of web search activity for cell biology terms is unique enough that searching on Correlate for ribosome brings up searches for other biology terms, such as mitochondria.”
In a broader world than biology, “Brand managers keen to see if their promotional TV ad campaigns result in echoed online activity searching for their brands (and possibly compared to their competition) can do so with a few clicks. Publishing houses can see whether readers are searching for their magazine, or their online entity,” comments Fast Company.
Consider it another free tool from Google, which will benefit as their tool is widely used and advances an even more granular understanding of data correlation; but the benefit for all of us, garnered from relational and predictive analysis in a highly correlative world, is a gift of unsearchable magnitude
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