AMERICAS UNEMPLOYED LEAVE THIER FOOTPRINTS ON GOOGLE

(I Factor in the bottom trend line because it shows the number of times the search term
was published in a news article. This could influence peoples search habits.)



Above is a graph of American searches for "Unemployment Benefits" on Google. Presumably the big leap in searches in early January of 2009 shows the newly unemployed trying to figure out how to get a check. This leads me to believe that the the economy is deteriorating further and that Februaries numbers will be ugly. This information can be readily obtained on Google Labs under the trends tool. I found unrelated data playing with this tool that leads me to believe that these graphs are very accurately tuned to the organic capitalist rhythms of our western world, for example, by entering pornographic search terms I found that most American wanking occurs on weekends and that the kinkiest surfers reside in Germany. The kinkiest German city is Hamburg. The chart below shows American porn searches via Google from December through early January using a common term for the female genitalia. Notice how the searches spike on weekends. There is even a double spike on the 3 day Holiday weekend. Nice.


I first played with this tool in January and found a big leap in the unemployment rate that made me curious. I took note when the unemployment rate surprisingly jumped a half percentage point weeks later and the markets started to sell off in earnest.

Now for something really scary. Below is a four year chart of searches for "Jobs". Initially in the spring of '08 the searches came heavily from Las Vegas, Florida and North Carolina, but now it seems the majority of jobless are in Minnesota, New York and North Carolina (again). Google does not give any numbers to allow for a true calibration of the charts below, but gosh these squiggly lines are convincing.