Google Inc. launched Google Correlate Experimental Service

It turns out that user requests can correlate very well with, for example, the rate of spread of the flu. That is, the frequency of requests related to the same flu may coincide with the growth rate of the number of influenza diseases. If such a correlation to display on the graph, then there is almost complete coincidence. This was noticed around the end of 2008, when Google developers launched Google Flu Trends . This service tracked the number of user requests related to influenza and compared such data with the rate of spread of the disease. It turned out that, based on all these data, it is possible to predict the likelihood of the onset of an influenza epidemic in a particular region or even to predict the development of an epidemic, and for a sufficiently long period.

Naturally, scientists from various fields became interested in this service, and the developers of the corporation in several years presented a new service that allows tracking the dependencies between the number of certain requests and an arbitrary function describing a certain trend, given in the form of date / data. By downloading an arbitrary function describing a process (for example, an increase in the number of representatives of the passerine group in New Zealand), you can track the relationship of such a function with a specific group of requests.
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In addition, the service allows you to do without entering statistical data, and simply track the frequency of repetition of any requests of a particular group. And another interesting point - the new service allows you to identify requests that correlate with each other.

Naturally, the creators of the service do not guarantee a causal relationship between all these trends. It is possible that a variety of events and trends can correlate with each other, for example, the occurrence of a query related to football can be correlated with a real function describing a change in the luminosity of a star. One can only imagine what fantastic correlations people who are passionate about, for example, esoteric, can make. Nevertheless, the Google Correlate service is quite interesting, and, presumably, useful for the same scientists, or marketers.

Via googleblog