Are we searching ourselves into a recession?

In January 2008, not long after I started blogging for SmartCompany, I wrote an article about the impending United States recession, and ultimate GFC based on Google Trends data.

After all the recent sharemarket hoo haa I thought I’d check to see whether searches for “recession” were on the rise… and the short answer is yes.

Looking at Google Trends and Google Insights for search, there has been a sudden and very recent spike in “recession” search activity.

Could this be a case of “here we go again”?

I’m sure glad I don’t live in Botswana right now. Recession based search activity from there is off the charts. India’s not looking too flash either with over 9% inflation in spite of eight interest rate rises this year to try and keep it in check.

Google’s been using trends data for ages in all sorts of ways, from health to finance. It’s the enviable position of having so much aggregated search data that it can be put to good use for forecasting.

They’ve had Google Flu Trends for a few years now and it’s used to forecast influenza outbreaks both globally and locally. Tasmania and the Northern Territory are looking pretty good places to be if you want to avoid the flu.

More recently, Google’s created Google Finance where you can check indexes of various industry and economic verticals. It’s a fascinating view of history especially in terms of how search imitates life.

You can see how searches for mortgages feel off a cliff in the United States when the subprime crisis kicked off the GFC. What goes up…

The housing market in the US looks pretty flat and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of recovery in the chart.

These Google Domestic Trend charts are only for the United States at this stage, but will hopefully be rolled out to other countries at some point.

Alan Kohler could have a field day with these!

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.