Let’s start with a simple premise: The more often something happens, the more often people write about it.
Sounds reasonable, right?
Albert Saiz and Uri Simonsohn, in their article “Downloading Wisdom from Online Crowds,” demonstrate that the relative frequency of documents returned by a search engine can be a good measure of how frequently a phenomenon occurs. For example, if you want to know the relative cost of living in all U.S. cities (or the relative amount of corruption, or perhaps even how good the golfing is) then simply searching for “Dallas cost-of-living” and “San Francisco cost-of-living” may give you a great index. If it works as advertised, this is a fantastic general research tool for analysts and marketing researchers. Let’s take a look.
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Jeb is a 13-year Internet veteran with depth in database marketing, business intelligence, predictive modeling, and marketing research. He holds a PhD in experimental psychology.
