The connection between online browsing, shopping and the market is well known. I first read about it in 2002. Seems it lead the market by about 3 weeks. A friend had a marble importing business. He said like clockwork when the hits on his website when up a lot about 3 weeks later the market would go up. I assumed someone was using this for timing purposes.
so he was importing or exporting marble? this google trends seems like an interesting data source but with tricky causality. some relationships are one way. others two way. seems like u need to do more stats analysis to prove on or the other. i'm gonna keep "treasury bubble" in my bookmarks.
seems like this would have also been useful for other bubbles. i searched for ethanol, this is the chart for 2006's search volume above a chart for imperial sugar (IPSU)
Same holds true for the uranium bubble. "uranium stocks" on Google Trends peaked in april 2007 just as the uranium stocks did. http://www.theuptrend.com/Uranium-W2.gif Nice tool indeed, will add this to my ever growing arsenal of useful timing tools.
yeah, search term "uranium stocks" peaked around april 2007 just as in your chart: http://tinyurl.com/a2wz6s also, that site posted daily search trends data vs s&p, def a self reinforcing process imho http://tinyurl.com/9b6pev