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Drones vs. Kidneys: Google Autofill on the Economy
If you were looking
for a national collective conscience, you could do worse than to check
out Google’s autofill feature – when Google’s search engine tries to
guess what you’re looking for by “autofilling” a few letters of a query
into a fully formed question.
Take a recent search for “Who Is?” The autofill suggests that Americans are very interested in ISIS, the brutal group of Sunni militants in Iraq and Syria, as well as The Bachelor, the reality TV show in which a group of women compete to marry some guy they don’t know.
With the third quarter
now behind us, Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx
Group, a New York broker-dealer, used autofill and other “off the grid”
indicators, including Google Trends, to see how Americans feel about the
economy.
“Every quarter we take
a break from all the standard economic indicators to look at a range of
alternative data,” he wrote in a note to clients. “The purpose here is
to pose the question: Does the consensus view of the economy square with
what real people do in their daily lives?”
Some conclusions from autofill: Don’t be surprised if Dad comes home with a new drone and one kidney.
Mr. Colas has been
tracking Google autofill data for a while, and for most of the last
three years the top three positions for completing the query, “I want to
buy…” have been won by “a house,” “a car” and “stock.”
The fourth spot tends
to vary with the news cycle, and in past quarters has included things
like “a gun,” “a dog” and “Facebook stock.”
“Gun” has jumped
around and in the past had the top spot, but hasn’t reached the top four
in a year. Last year, the top spot in the fourth quarter went to “a
drone”; in the second quarter, it was “something.”
From Guns to Drones
Recurring autofill terms when Google users start a search.
I want to buy...
| First Quarter, 2011 | First Quarter, 2012 | First Quarter, 2013 | First Quarter, 2014 | Second Quarter | Third Quarter |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a house | you something | a gun | a house | a house | a house |
| a car | a car | a car | stock | stock | a car |
| stock | stock | stock | a dog | a car | stock |
| a gun | something | something | a car | something | a drone |
Maybe that shouldn’t
be surprising, given the number of drones in the news lately. Google
announced a drone delivery effort dubbed Project Wing in the third quarter. The New York Times also reported on NASA’s efforts to create an air-traffic control system for drone aircraft.
And the prospect of
drones landing in backyards and peering into bedroom windows has freaked
a lot of people out. Speaking about drones in September, Supreme Court
Justice Sonia Sotomayor told an Oklahoma City audience,
“That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it
that we cherish in privacy and how far we want to protect it and from
whom.”
One thing people do
not seem to cherish are their kidneys; “kidney” was the third autofill
option – after “car” and “house” – for the query “I want to sell my …”
This could simply be morbid curiosity. In an interview, Mr. Colas said
“hair” has also ranked high in past quarters.
I want to sell my...
|
First Quarter,
2011 |
First Quarter,
2012 |
First Quarter,
2013 |
First Quarter,
2014 |
Second Quarter | Third Quarter |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a house | car | car | car | car | car |
| car | soul | house | kidney | kidney | house |
| ipad | furniture | kidney | hair | house | kidney |
“The point is not so
much to develop an alternative paradigm of economic analysis as it is to
poke and prod at the consensus we all embrace,” Mr. Colas wrote. “After
all, can the U.S. economy be doing all that well if (I want to sell a)
‘Kidney’ is a common autofill?”
Looking beyond
autofill to Google Trends data, Mr. Colas found that interest in gold
coins, which hit at a post-financial-crisis low, suggests people are
feeling much better about the nation’s financial system. But many
Americans are still worried about money and food, as interest in food
stamps ticked higher from earlier in the year.
Mr. Colas’s analysis
included other oddball economic indicators like an inflation measure
called the Bacon Cheeseburger Index (up about 6%), which measures how
much it would cost to make a bacon cheeseburger at home.
He also looked at
government data of how often people are quitting their jobs. The quits
rate has become something of a mainstream indicator in the wake of the
Great Recession. Quits are a good thing, since people don’t usually
leave their jobs unless they have another gig lined up or at least feel
confident they can find something.
All in all,
alternative indicators point to an economy that continues to mend, but
has mended so slowly that people still have severe anxieties about the
future. That’s the same conclusion you would come to by looking at more
traditional indicators like consumer confidence or the government’s monthly jobs report, which in September showed the unemployment rate falling below 6 percent for the first time since July 2008.
“But it feels like we
got here by drone, with a different perspective of the same picture,”
Mr. Colas concluded. “At least we didn’t have to sell our kidney to see
it.”
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