New Trend Tracking Feature in Google Finance

Google has introduced Google Domestic Trends on Google Finance. This is a feature that tracks search traffic (on Google) across specific sectors of the economy.

"The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight," Google says. "We have created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment. Each index value is baselined at 1.0 on January 1, 2004 and is calculated and displayed on the Google Finance charts as a 7-day moving average. You can easily compare actual stocks and market indexes to these Google Trends on the charts."

The trends the feature tracks include:

- Advertising and Marketing
- Air Travel
- Auto Buyers
- Auto Financing
- Automotive
- Banking and Personal Finance
- Business
- Computers and Electronics
- Construction
- Credit and Lending
- Durable Goods
- Finance and Insurance
- Furniture
- Industries
- Investments
- Jobs
- Luxury Goods
- Mortgage
- Real Estate
- Rental
- Retail Trade
- Travel
- Unemployment

Google shares an example of the Luxuries Index, which tracks queries like [jewelry], [rings], [diamond], [ring], [jewelers], [tiffany], etc.

Data from the indexes are available for download, letting users utilize it in their own models. More information about the indexes can be found here. The Domestic Trends feature comes as the result of research from Google's Chief Economist Hal Varian, who explains his methodology here.