Fascinating Economic Information...

I just discovered a source of some fascinating economic information, courtesy of Google. They've been tracking the frequency of certain search queries since 2004. The results are publicly available.

For example, the graph at right shows computer and electronic related queries. An industry rule-of-thumb for many years has been that consumer electronics make a quarter to a third of all their sales in the last six weeks of the year. On the graph you can clearly see that exact trend, including two big peaks at Thanksgiving and Christmas. You can also see the generally downward trend of the past few years.

On the other hand, look as the graph at left to see how the current recession affects queries about unemployment benefits. Obviously we're not out of the woods yet (on the current recession)!

Dig a little deeper into that unemployment graph and you'll see small peaks of activity every January (when extra holiday season retail workers are laid off), and dips every mid-November (when extra holiday season retail workers are hired). There's a small peak in the summertime, I'll speculate because of high-school and college kids trying to find jobs.

Fascinating stuff, updated every day. Unlike government-supplied data, this is raw data – not “adjusted” in various ways with often political motivations. It's also near-realtime, so you don't have to wait a month or more to see what's happening. Personally, I'd trust my own interpretation of Googles raw data on unemployment queries much more than I'd trust the government's opaque unemployment numbers. I'll be watching this site...