What if we could get good clues about the economy, individual industries or even companies, well before companies or governments release their monthly numbers (sometimes weeks after the facts) ?
That would be a dream come true for longer term investors.

Well, the 'Insights for Search' page on Google offers us access to such real time data.
The idea is this: if more people search the net for e.g. 'furniture', then it is quite probable that more people are buying furniture.

So how does this work in practice?
Let's take a more concrete example.

Consider Myspace.
Here we see the google trends for search on 'myspace' since 2004:


We can see this company had a huge peak around mid 2007, and then started a steady decline.
The reason is not a secret: Facebook started taking over.

Here we have the search trends for 'facebook':




As you can see, Facebook started taking off in mid 2007, exactly when Myspace started going down in the search trends.
We can also see that right now (March 2011) , the chart for Facebook shows possible signs of topping out.
Search for facebook just dropped to a 4 month low. That has not happened before.
This chart looks very similar to Myspace in mid 2007.
So I keep an eye on it.

Let's also have a look at Twitter, another player in the same field.
This is the search trend for 'twitter' since 2004:


Apparently Twitter tends to have dips every autumn (why?), but so far no signs of the long term uptrend getting weaker.


By now you probably get the idea how to use these trends for investing purposes.

I have set up some thematic pages with search trends I consider useful.
Just click the links in the left side menu to access them.

The charts displayed on this site automatically update with the latest trend data.