Mountain View, California — Google has developed a novel process to predict popular online search topics in what it hopes to be a blessing for businesses eager to target ads that accompany Internet search results. Google announced a new forecasting feature for its Insights for Search, the company’s search data analysis tool, that would enable users to view the future of a search trend to supplement the past data it currently shows.
Now available in 39 languages, Google Insights for Search includes a new forecasting feature that can extrapolate a search term’s future popularity based on its past performance.
Although the feature is not fully functional for all search queries, but there are some that follow a similar trend every year, allowing the search giant to predict its short term future. In addition to the new forecast feature the company has introduced a new map to visualize the way searches change over time in different regions.
Engineers in Google’s lab in Israel discovered a forecasting model while studying whether past and current search patterns hold reliable clues to what people will seek online in months to come.
“We see that many search trends are predictable,” Yossi Matias, Niv Efron, and Yair Shimshoni of Google Labs in Israel wrote in a message at the California Internet titan’s website.
“We characterize the predictability of a Trends series based on its historical performance.”
As for the search terms with a huge amount of historical data, Google Insights for Search can forecast a likely trend. It is not such an accurate prediction of what is to come, but it may be helpful in certain circumstances.
“An understanding of search trends can be useful for advertisers, marketers, economists, scholars, and anyone else interested in knowing more about their world and what is currently top-of-mind,” Google Labs, researchers behind the forecasting feature, wrote.
This is illustrated in the following video:
“This prediction model does not take into account the context of the search term or its category, nor does it account for any business cycles that may be driving a specific market,” says Google in the Insights for Search Help Center. “Please treat these forecasts as estimates only, and not as exact predictions of future values.”
“Looking at search trends helps you understand when, where and how the world’s interests have changed. Simply type in search terms to see how search query volume has evolved over time, in which geographic regions search interest is greatest and other related searches,” Google says.
Google Trends is a free online service that displays what search subjects are gaining or sinking in popularity. Insights for Search uses the same data but is geared for advertisers or researchers who want to dig deeper.
More than half of the most popular search queries at Google are predictable as far as a year ahead, with a margin of error of about 12 percent, according to the Israel lab engineers.
Categories such as health, travel, and food and drink are particularly predictable, while searches regarding entertainment and social networks have proven harder to foresee, the team said.
In addition to these new features, Google also announced that Insights for Search is now available in 39 different languages.
Update: Google has a fascinating research paper available about how it predicts search trends. Some of the key findings from this research are highlighted in this post at Google’s Research Blog.