Commentary

Searches Rising When People Search On ( ____ )

Keyword search terms that consumers query on google.com correlate to interesting trends. Searches for Facebook -- more than any other term -- have some sort of relationship with the unemployment rate.

Google has a tool on Google Trends that enables marketers to find queries to a series of data with similar patterns. Marketers can use either real-world trends from a data set of event counts over time or a query entered on the site.

Google describes the tool as using Google Trend in reverse. Type in a query and the tool spits back a series of data over time or in each U.S. state. Enter a data series in Google Correlate and get back a list of queries whose data series follows a similar pattern. The data is updated weekly.

Bloomberg uploaded unemployment rate data to see which searches are most closely tied to the numbers. Higher unemployment translates to more Facebook searches, and lower unemployment means fewer Facebook searches. Aside from the fact that people have more time on their hands, there's no other logical reason that the correlation should outnumber searches for actual unemployment-related topics.

Since we are a couple of weeks away from Super Bowl XLVIII in new Meadowlands Stadium in Rutherford, NJ, I wanted to see what Americans are thinking. It seems tickets are top of mind. I searched on "Super Bowl," and the correlation for "super bowl ticket" in the United States for Web search activity was 0.8806. "2012 super bowl" followed with 0.8646; "the super bowl," 0.8320; and "what is the nfl," 0.8245.

Search on weather and you'll get "smartwool socks sale" at 0.8974 mostly concentrated in Vermont, Montana and Wyoming, which scares me a bit because I plan to take a trip to the latter sometime next year. I hear it's beautiful country. The term "coffee travel" follows close behind at 0.8899, and "bird identification" at 0.8834.

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