RICK KLAU AND Bill Tancer offer thoughts related to helping businesses (or politicians or production researchers) get themselves sorted. For example, Hitwise predicted drops in home sales before they happened. Bill Tancer points out that the National Association of Realtors needs around a month to cobble together their analysis, so definitive data about July is in front of the US housing industry nearly a quarter later than it unfolded as a tidbit in search engine analysis.
As Klau says, "Hitwise saw this coming. The web stats and competitive intelligence company saw a drop in July in searches for terms relating to home sales, and has seen a similar pick-up in August. So Bill’s not only saying they saw this coming, he’s predicting that August’s numbers will pick up. (Reuters picked up on this yesterday.)"
Some Irish bloggers have thought about leading the masses through clever hammering home of a topic. It means running with a meme to generate interest and community awareness. This would affect political polling, when an Irish politician resonates the same meme in a stump speech and then a surge of search engine traffic picks up on the idea. The IrishBlogs aggregator suggests what those memes might be. The Steorn energy promo enjoyed a boost last week. Sometimes road safety appears at the top of the chatter. Adam Maguire offers a coherent take of the week's mutterings in a regular piece he writes about the connected memes of discussion.
When the whole of Ireland takes up an interest in something, the collective curiouslty manifests itself as a Googlestream. A stream of Google requests will start to hit individual bloggers and the blog aggregators.
I wonder if the political consultants reading this have considered using search as a leading indicator of election manifestos. And I wonder who in Ireland might brokering access to real-time search data. As I've discussed with James Corbett, I think the first vantage point should be quickly coded in a Grazr window. I also think it's a real money-maker as a premium Zenark service.
Rick Klau -- "Search as a leading economic indicator"
James Corbett's illuminating comments.
Bill Tancer -- "Unexpected decline in existing home sales? Not exactly.
