Nowcasting with Google Trends: Google Chief Economist Hal Varian Delivers Okun Lecture

Can Google search data predict the economy?

In a talk this week hosted by the Department of Economics, Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian presented on how Google Trends can be used to forecast economic activity, including GDP, unemployment, and where you’ll buy your next coffee.

Varian visited the Department to deliver the Okun Lecture, an annual series that “seeks to recognize and encourage professional economists to search for policies that will contribute to the betterment of life and living.” His talk, titled “Nowcasting with Google Trends,” explored how Google search queries can be used to predict economic variables in real time. “Nowcasting in economics is the prediction of the very recent past, the present, and the very near future state of an economic indicator,” he said.

Read the full summary of the talk here: https://economics.yale.edu/news/23042...