14 DAY TRIAL // Google is announcing some new features for Google Insights for Search, the company's search data analysis tool, that will allow users to see the future of a search trend to supplement the past data it currently shows. The feature isn't enabled for all search terms but there are some that follow a similar trend every year, allowing the search giant to predict its short term future. Along with the new forecast feature the company has introduced a new map to visualize the way searches change over time in different regions.
“An understanding of search trends can be useful for advertisers, marketers, economists, scholars, and anyone else interested in knowing more about their world and what's currently top-of-mind,” Yossi Matias, Niv Efron, and Yair Shimshoni, Google Labs, Israel, the researchers behind the forecasting feature, wrote.
“As we see that many of the search trends are predictable, we are introducing today a new forecasting feature in Insights for Search, along with a new version of the product. The forecasting feature is applied to queries which are identified as predictable (see, for instance, basketball or the trends in the Automotive category) and then shown as an extrapolation of the historical trends and search patterns.” they added.
Google was able to add the new predictive feature as it found that many searches had a seasonal trend that continued every year with little variation. Some categories were more susceptible for this kind of behavior, like travel or food and drink searches. As these trends repeated year over year, Google believed that an algorithm could be created to provide a reasonably accurate prediction of future searches.
The research found that more than half of the popular Google queries are predictable for a full year ahead with a mean absolute prediction error of about 12 percent. This, of course, means that almost half of the popular queries aren't predictable. Some categories are more predictable than others, with 74 percent of health-related searches being predictable, followed by food and drink searches with 67 percent and travel queries with 65 percent.
The new features are now available in the latest version of Google Insights for Search, which is now available in 39 languages and also introduces a new animated map to allow users to see how the search trends change over time in different parts of the world.