Online searches for future linked to economic success

People in wealthier nations are far more likely to search for information about the future compared with citizens of poorer states, a study of 45 billion Google search queries has revealed. Writing in the journal Scientific Reports today, a team from University College London reveals a "striking correlation" between a country's per-capita gross domestic product "and its inhabitants' predisposition to look forward".

"Our results are consistent with the intriguing possibility that there is a relationship between the economic success of a country and the information-seeking behaviour of its citizens online," the authors write.

UCL mathematician Steven Bishop and colleagues Tobias Pries, Helen Moat and Eugene Stanley used Google Trends to analyse search queries made in 45 countries in 2010. Their methodology for sifting past and future searches was to count how many 2010 searches included the term "2009" and how many mentioned "2011".

In order to see how "future oriented" each nation was, the team then worked out the ratio of the number of searches for 2011 to those for 2009. They called that ratio the "future orientation index" (FOI). When they checked these indices against the relative wealth of each nation - its per-capita GDP - as listed in the CIA World Factbook of July 2010, they found a strong correlation.

For instance, Russia (with 2010 GDP per capita at $15,900 in 2010) has a future orientation index of 0.6. Higher up the graph Italy ($30,100) has an FOI of 1.0. Even higher are France ($35,000), the UK ($35,900) and Germany ($37,900), which are all at around 1.2.

The same correlation between wealth and FOI was seen in further analyses that centred on 2009 (measuring searches for 2008 and 2010) and 2008 (2007 and 2009).

Preis - a visiting professor from Boston University ? suggests an explanation for the relationship between search activity and GDP: focusing on the future may be one of the factors that lead to economic success.

The findings may also "reflect international differences in the type of information sought online, perhaps due to economic influences on available internet infrastructure," he says in the paper.

Counting year mentions is clearly an imperfect way to check feelings about the past and future, and to avoid statistical noise in the Google Trends data the study eliminated nations with less than 5 million internet users - many of which will be at the poorer end of the GDP scale where the correlation may falter.

But Greg Taylor, an economist at the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK, says the UCL work is certainly a novel type of study. "Most of what I see goes the other way - there's been work on what searches can tell us about. For example, economic factors like an impending recession, or the spread of flu." But Taylor hasn't seen a study that uses economic data to assess a nation's feel-good factor.

"These results have a certain intuitive appeal. I guess in the developed world, you have a lot more to search for in the future in terms of the cultural experiences available - such as upcoming movie releases."

Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/srep00350

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