Google Search Aggregates as a Sociology Tool
Forget the General Social Survey. In real time, do you want to know what is hot and what is not? http://www.google.com/trends will answer your question. If I may humbly make a suggestion, it would be cool if they stratify this data by U.S county or other geographical units. What are the people of Berkeley searching for? What are the people of Houston searching for? Are these searches positively correlated? The New York Times today claims that we all care about avoiding the flu and that Google trends has great predictive power for tracking flu cycles.
Now the GSS would counter that google offers a great dependent variable but offers few attributes of the searcher such as (42 year old bald PHD economist guy in westwood. Should Google do something about this? From your office IP address no. From your home IP address, I'm guessing that they could merge in lots of information for owners concerning the type of home, value, size etc. There must be ways to protect confidentiality and privacy issues.
What could be done with this new micro data? The Next Obama wouldn't need to pay polling firms to canvas voters, google could easily tell him "am I Hot?" "Where am I hot?" and study decay rates to see momentum.
When rock albums are released, bands would now what local markets to target based on American Idol type "votes" (i.e internet searches). Companies that can capitalize on network effects and bandwaggons would want to know which geographical areas appear to be susceptible to these effects (i.e wealthy teenagers in abundance there?).
Now the GSS would counter that google offers a great dependent variable but offers few attributes of the searcher such as (42 year old bald PHD economist guy in westwood. Should Google do something about this? From your office IP address no. From your home IP address, I'm guessing that they could merge in lots of information for owners concerning the type of home, value, size etc. There must be ways to protect confidentiality and privacy issues.
What could be done with this new micro data? The Next Obama wouldn't need to pay polling firms to canvas voters, google could easily tell him "am I Hot?" "Where am I hot?" and study decay rates to see momentum.
When rock albums are released, bands would now what local markets to target based on American Idol type "votes" (i.e internet searches). Companies that can capitalize on network effects and bandwaggons would want to know which geographical areas appear to be susceptible to these effects (i.e wealthy teenagers in abundance there?).
posted by Matthew E. Kahn at 11:03 AM
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