Document Type

Closed Project

Publication Date

Spring 2010

Instructor

Timothy Anderson

Course Title

Research Methods

Course Number

EMGT 565/665

Subjects

Internet research, Internet searching, Web search engines -- Evaluation

Abstract

Google Trends is a powerful tool in extracting and comparing searched terms through the time. It simply shows the increasing or decreasing of searching times for any term on the biggest search engine on the web. The goal of this paper is to find out whether Google Trends data has a significant correlation with the characteristics of the subject in the real world or not? For instance, is there any meaningful correlation between “volume search index” in Google Trends for a term like “Oil Price” and actual worldwide Oil price?

This paper tests the hypothesis on two similar cases; “Oil Price” and “Gold Price” to answer the above question. Research findings have shown a strong correlation between Google Trends volume search index and actual real world data for both terms. We have concluded that Google Trends could be a valuable, fast and free tool to predict the trends of such a trends, although it definitely needs more studies for verification or generalize the method. Limitations of Google Trends and our research have been mentioned as well.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

This project is only available to students, staff, and faculty of Portland State University

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/22692

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