Internet users in countries with greater socio-economic health are more likely to use Google to search for information about the future than about the past, according to a new study published online in Scientific Reports on 5 April. The researchers say their findings suggest there may be a link between online behavior and real-world economic indicators.
Co-author Dr Susannah Moat, a research associate in the Department of Mathematics at UCL in the UK, and colleagues, report that they analyzed Google logs and found a “striking correlation” between a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and the tendency of its people to look forward.
Moat said in a statement that the Internet is becoming deeply enmeshed in the fabric of global society.
“Our use of this gigantic information resource is generating huge amounts of data on our current interests and concerns. We were interested in whether we could find cross-country differences in basic online search behaviour which could be linked to real world indicators of socio-economic wellbeing, such as per capita GDP,” she explained.
For the study, Moat and colleagues examined data on Google searches made in 2010 by Internet users in 45 countries.
The data, which is held in the Google Trends website, includes over 45 billion search queries.
The researchers then calculated a “future orientation index” for each country: this is the ratio of searches for the coming year (which in 2010 would have been for 2011) to searches for the previous year (2009).
They then compared each country’s future orientation index to its per capita GDP.
The results showed a strong tendency for countries with a higher future orientation index, that is where Internet users were using Google to enquire more about the future, to show a higher GDP.
For example, one cluster on the “best fit” line through the plots on the chart shows UK, Germany, France and Japan, all with future orientation indices of around 1.2, and similar per capital GDPs in 2010 (between $35,000 and $38,000). While Russia is lower down, with a future orientation index of 0.6 and a per capital GDP of nearly $16,000 in 2010.
In their discussion, the authors suggest two reasons for this:
“Firstly, these findings may reflect international differences in attention to the future and the past, where a focus on the future supports economic success. Secondly, these findings may reflect international differences in the type of information sought online, perhaps due to economic influences on available Internet infrastructure.”
They propose that the future orientation index could be a useful measure to include with other social and economic indicators, to help us see worldwide society as reflected in the way it uses the Internet.
Every day, the Internet, and other electronic systems are increasingly giving us the opportunity to mine and analyze huge amounts of data that can give insights into what is happening in the world, from flu epidemics to stock market trading.
One such group that is already looking at this is the FuturICT, a large European project currently co-ordinated by co-author Dr Steven Bishop, a professor of Mathematics at UCL.
FuturICT is looking at best ways to use these large data sets to understand the dynamics of human behavior interacting with networked systems, in terms of both the opportunities of being more connected, and the catastrophes (the recent financial crisis being a good example of the latter).
Written by Catharine Paddock PhD