The world according to Google?

Google does "the wisdom of crowds."

Google trends offers a near real-time view of life concerns. Image: Google

If you think about the millions of searches conducted daily using Google, (GOOG) there is reason to believe you ought to be able to divine patterns or trends from the activity. If everyone is searching for a particular song for example, you might expect that artist to climb the charts. If searches are fast and furious for a digital camera, sales ought to correspondingly increase.

But can examining a broader swath of Google searches related to specific industries inform where those sectors, and the broader economy is headed? The propeller-heads at Google think it can.

Tucked away inside Google Finance is the newly-launched, “Google Domestic Trends”.  While it sounds like it might offer the latest in recipes for meatloaf or techniques for pressing a shirt collar, what it does is track search traffic across 23 specific sectors of the economy ranging from auto buyers, to jobs and the retail trade. More