27 May, 2011
By Greg Morgan
A new search data mining tool is available from Google, called Google Correlate. Now launched on Google Labs, this tool allows user to upload their own data series and view a list of search terms whose popularity corresponds with a real world trend.
This tool has been developed due to limitations in other tools like Google Trends and Google Insights for Search. While these systems allow users to enter a search term and see the corresponding trend, Google Correlate works in reverse. Instead, users can enter the trend of some real world activity and see which search terms match the best.
While Google are selling this tool as a way to source data for economics, health, and science, it will also be very useful for online marketers and web publishers who are looking for quantifiable data on current trends. This really is a powerful tool however, and could be used in a multitude of different ways.
Google have offered a real world example of how to use this tool on the Google blog, along with details on everyone’s favourite subject at the moment – privacy.
Search activity is an incredible source of data that may lead to advances in economics, health and other fields; but we need to handle that data with privacy controls in mind. With this system, we don’t care what any one person is searching for. In fact, we rely on millions of anonymized search queries issued to Google over time, and the patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations.
We encourage you to read our white paper describing the methodology behind Google Correlate. Or for lighter reading, check out our comic! We’ve enjoyed uploading different data sets to see fascinating and sometimes perplexing correlations. Plug in your data and let us know what you find.
