Google has launched Google Domestic Trends on Google Finance.

As per Google Finance Blog:

Google Domestic Trends tracks Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight. We have created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment. Each index value is baselined at 1.0 on January 1, 2004 and is calculated and displayed on the Google Finance charts as a 7-day moving average. You can easily compare actual stocks and market indexes to these Google Trends on the charts.

Interesting Examples

Google Retail Index and clothing store sales

From the graph below you will see that actual clothing store sales (source) and retail sales search volume on Google have been decreasing over time. There are seasonal spikes in actual retail sales, but over time there has been a pronounced decrease.

Google Auto Buyers Index

User searches related to car buying increased dramatically with the launch of the US Government’s Cash for Clunkers program. We see that the Auto Buyers Index jumped to 1.4 at the end of July 2009.

What’s the use

Google search volumes in a month can help better predict real world statistics well before they are officially tabulated and released; Google claimed.

Predicting retail sales
The US Census Bureau releases the Advance Monthly Retail Sales survey 1–2 weeks after the close of each month. These figures are based on a mail survey from a number of retail establishments and are thought to be useful leading indicators of macroeconomic performance.

Google Domestic Trends data
The Google RETAIL index tracks query volumes on Google.com related to the retail trade category. Sample queries are “retail, bags, retail sales”.  For this analysis Google use the index value (30 day moving average) in the middle of the month. Thus, to predict retail sales of March, 2008 it uses the index value on March 15th, 2008.

The Mean Absolute Error improves from 6.52% to 3.65% (an improvement of 44%); Google claimed.

See Google Insight for Search for the followings:

I have tried to search the data of Computers & Electronics category from 2004 to present of Delhi (India); and got the very interesting data and the forecast for the future as well. Have a look:

Its very interesting to see the Top searches and Rising searched  of India, World and other countries.

Isn’t it interesting to know that SBI, ICICI and HDFC banks are on the 1st, 2nd & 3rd top searches in Delhi (India) from 2009 to till date? And for your information Central Bank and HDFC netbanking are the top on rising searches in Delhi from 2009 to present.

And, most interestingly:  The data for these indexes are available for download—so you can use it with your own models.

More details can be found in the Google Research Blog.

Try yourself clicking here.