A glimpse at the future
Fancy being able to look into the future? Well, at last the clever people at google have made it possible for us to see what is going to happen in the next few months.
Sounds improbable? Think again.
Any ‘buying decision’ goes through various stages before cash gets handed across the table, and all these stages can be measured by google. Take as example people considering a trip to France.
At first they tend to use broad searches (eg ‘Visit France’) while they are starting to form their plans. Then they do more detailed searches (e.g. ‘things to do in the Dordogne’) as they try and form a more definite travel plan. Then finally they move to long searches (eg ‘gite with pool near Sarlat’) when they are ready to commit to their visit. This entire planning sequence can take several weeks, even months.
The google boffins have demonstrated that by looking at the number of searches carried out for particular search terms, they can accurately forecast the amount of business that will follow on later, or at least see whether things will be better or worse than previous years. So take this graph:
The graph shows the number of searches for the phrase ‘holidays in France’ for each of the last few years. (Note that the graph only includes UK searches, also a US search would use ‘vacation’ instead of ‘holiday’).
See how every year around the New Year the number of searches rises dramatically? Now look at the start of 2009 – the rise was only about 50% of the normal. Likewise, the number of searches between January and April is perhaps 35% lower than normal.
So if the theory is right, we can estimate that the number of people taking holidays in France this year will be about 1/3rd less than recent years. Not good news for those involved in the travel industry: gites, restaurants, hotels etc.
The same ‘looking into the future’ principle can be applied to everything – from sales of plasma televisions to estimating Tour de France spectator numbers, and a million other things. So whatever business you are in, you will find something interesting to check up on.
See www.google.com/trends if you are interested in what your own future holds…but be careful what you wish for.
Could be…then again, it may be that people are changing the parameters that they search on.
When we were young and naïve and thought that entering “Holidays in France” into a search engine would actually yield some usefeul results (around 2004 that would be) then that was whet we did.
But then search engine optimisation came along and “Holidays in France” would bring up anything but and quite a lot of pornography to boot, so we (or, at least, I) got a little more savvy about how we searched.
Nowadays, if I were serious about a holiday in a part of the world that I had not visited before I would first go to our local library and find a guide, make a few notes and then do far more specific searches based on what I had found.
Google is important, no doubt, but their importance can be exagerated. There remains more than one way to skin a cat.