InnerTeub

While procrastinating a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an article from, REvolution Computing’s blog (they focus on the predicative stat computing package R):

Varian used R to fit seasonal autoregressive models to retail sales, automotive sales, home sales, and passenger arrival data, and in each case made better predictions by including Google Trends data as a predictor than without

Hello, what’s this? Real time trending data? Apparently:

From the Google:

Google Trends and Google Insights for Search provide a real time report on query volume, while economic data is typically released several days after the close of the month. Given this time lag, it is not implausible that Google queries in a category like “Automotive/Vehicle Shopping” during the first few weeks of March may help predict what actual March automotive sales will be like when the official data is released halfway through April.

Duuuude. This is so cool. In my last job I did a TON of market research and provided reports with trending data aligned to company goals, and the trending data we had was always SO OLD, but was accepted as standard because, really, what else could we use? Well, apparently there is a better way.

(This reminds me when we learned that TiVO stored all the data of what commercials people were fast forwarding through, which ones they would watch, and which ones they would watch again. That is a TON of consumer marketing data just begging to be analyzed. If I worked at an advertising/marketing/PR firm, I would be eating this stuff up!)

I hope this takes off and becomes standard. I’ve been playing around with R and Google ever since I read about this and am having a blast. If I was still teaching lab courses in statistical computing  to English majors (which I did throughout grad school), this would become an integral part of my lesson plan: “Look, ye English Majors! Stats IS useful!! No, really, Google says it is!”

As it is, I’ll just geek around with it and hope that I can use it the next time I’m asked to do trending reports on government spend something or other.

/geek