Study links Google search behaviour to GDP

Internet users from countries with a higher per capita gross domestic product (GDP) are more likely to search for information about the future than information about the past, a quantitative analysis of Google search queries has shown. The findings, published today in the journal Scientific Reports, suggest there may be a link between online behaviour and real-world economic indicators. "The Internet is becoming ever more deeply interwoven into the fabric of global society", said Helen Susannah Moat, research associate in UCL's Department of Mathematics and one of the authors of the study. "Our use of this gigantic information resource is generating huge amounts of data on our current interests and concerns. We were interested in whether we could find cross-country differences in basic online search behaviour which could be linked to real world indicators of socio-economic wellbeing, such as per capita GDP," said Moat. The team of four behind the results, Tobias Preis, Helen Susannah Moat, H. Eugene Stanley and Steven R. Bishop, examined Google search queries made by Internet users in 45 different countries in 2010, to calculate the ratio of the volume of searches for the coming year ('2011') to the volume of searches for the previous year ('2009'), which they call the 'future orientation index'. We were interested in whether we could find cross-country differences in basic online search behaviour which could be linked to real world indicators of socio-economic wellbeing, such as per capita GDP.