Here is a story form Reuters about an interesting trend in stock analysis. According to this article:
With e-commerce now comprising a larger share of consumer spending than ever before, Web-based data mining has become a rich source to track products sales and generate sales leads.
But instead of sales leads, Majestic uses Web data to track sales and forecast financial results for target companies – ahead of quarterly earnings releases.
According to this article, hedge funds are the early adopters for this service from Majestic Research.