14 DAY TRIAL // Google Finance is bolstering its offering with a new product that it hopes will set it apart in the very competitive market, where Google is actually trailing by a significant margin. With the new Google Domestic Trends, the company wants to leverage its most powerful asset, search data, by using it to give insight into key economic indicators, helping interested users “predict the present.”
“Google Domestic Trends tracks Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight. We've created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment,” Hal Varian, chief economist, and Ayan Mandal, product manager, Google Finance, wrote. “For example, the Google Luxuries Index tracks queries like [jewelry], [rings], [diamond], [ring], [jewelers], [tiffany] and so forth.”
The idea is pretty simple, by using the search trend data for various keywords, the new tool could give those interested in the respective field a new perspective and could be used to anticipate a future trend or just analyze the current one. Google Finance currently has several indexes related to business sectors or just overall economic markers.
The site allows users to compare the search trends with established stock market indexes, like the Dow Jones, S&P 500 and Nasdaq, with the actual index for the previous years showing up in the graphs. Users can also compare the Domestic Trends indexes with any stock quote for listed companies. However, it doesn't provide any actual corresponding index based on real-world data, which would be a much more meaningful indicator.
Still, it could prove an interesting tool providing a unique view on certain market trends, and Google could use any help it can get to pull up its Finance product, as its audience hovers around 600,000 unique, monthly visitors and has been dropping this year, this while Yahoo Finance gets almost 20 million visitors every month.