Gleaning Sentiments from Search Trends

We have been enjoying the benefits of Google Search and Google Trends. Once in a while, Google comes up with some interesting tools that gives us a peek at what you can do by tracking search trends. A search provides some insight into interests and sentiments. By tracking a large number of searches and identifying search patterns, you can get some glimpses into mass sentiments.

Google’s Domestic Trends is an amazing service.

Google Domestic Trends track Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. Changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide unique economic insight. You can access individual trend indexes by clicking on the left-hand navigation.

When you look at trends of searches people do, you get a very high level view of the sentiments. Google provides this for US, Canada, UK, China and Hong Kong. It is amazing that you can download some of the data into your spreadsheets for further analysis.