Google Searches Expose Our Hunger for Predictions
What can Google's search data reveal about our hunger to know today what will happen tomorrow?
Using Google Trends and Google’s Keyword Tool, I examined the top 350 future-oriented keywords. Combined, they represent 152,620,240 searches a month. Here are four of the major trends uncovered.
1. We think about the future most often in December and least often in July. The motivation behind this clockwork activity goes beyond New Year’s resolutions. People are looking for predictions about their careers, spouses, industries and even countries.
2. Four industries are top of mind: One third of the 350 keywords focus on just four sectors -- Technology, Auto, Entertainment and Finance. Anecdotally, we know that the concepts of technology and the future are often linked. What's different now is we can measure the degree to which that’s true. We also see the presence of sectors that aren’t as obviously linked to futurism.
3. The only countries present in the data are the U.S., India and Pakistan. I’ll leave it to others to guess why that's the case, but what’s startling is the absence of searches for European, Asian and African nations.
4. Psychics? Really??? One in five future-oriented keywords reveal people looking for straight-out predictions. Together, they represent 34,889,400 searches a month! That's intriguing at first blush, but the data quickly takes a dismaying turn. Nearly everyone is looking to supernatural sources, like psychics and astrology, rather than rational ones grounded in science or professional forecasting. Maybe it's all in good fun looking up horoscopes, but still...99% is a big number.
Other interesting findings:
* Jobs: There are 482,100 searches a month for terms related to future careers
* Job security? The term "future proof" is searched 18,100 times per month
* Trends: “Future trends” is Google'd 74,000 times a month.
How does this square with your expectations about how other people feel about the future? Leave your comments below, and check out Google Trends and Google's Keyword tool and play around with the data. If you see something interesting, please share!
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Comments
High-tech superstition
Looking at the combination of fascinating results you present, I'd hazard an opinion that the data evidences that the US has high-tech superstition. It's not that people in the US are necessarily more superstitious or religious than in other countries ( but note my comment further on regarding Europe), but they are going to a new trusted source of guidance - the Internet - rather than to traditional sources such as religious or spritual leaders.
The absence of Europe in the data could be related to a far lower level of trust in non-scientific sources - generally Europe exhibits lower levels of regular spiritual/religious worship that the US and many other nations. I haven't checked the data, but the ratios between India and Pakistan seem to me to be somewhat proportional to their relative population sizes, and both have combinations of high-tech and high spirituality. As the high-tech is not universally spread throughout these counties, sources of spiritual future guidance are divided across the Internet and spiritual leaders, leaving the US in front place in the data.
What is particularly interesting to me is that people who have a spiritual faith of one sort or another ( and I'm sure that further investigation of the data would reveal a very diverse mixture of religions and spiritual orientations) are not personally going 'direct', as it were, or via face- to-face intermediary, but are going to a very worldly source of information and trusting that the search engine top results are spiritually authoritative and accurate.
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