Google has launched an experimental service Google Correlate

It turns out that the user requests may very well be correlated with, for example, the speed of the spread of influenza. That is, the frequency of requests associated with the same flu, can match with the speed of growth in the number of diseases flu. If such a correlation is to display on the graph, there is almost complete coincidence. This was spotted somewhere in the end of 2008, when Google launched the service Google Flu Trends. The service tracked the number of user requests associated with the flu, and compared such data with the speed of the spread of the disease. It turned out that on the basis of these data it is possible to predict the probability of occurrence of the beginning of a flu epidemic in a particular region or even to predict the development of epidemics, and for quite a long time.

of Course, scientists of different areas are interested in this service, and developers corporations few years presented new service, which allows to track dependencies between a number of defined queries and arbitrary function describing some sort of trend that is specified in the form date/data. Downloading an arbitrary function describing a process (for example, increase the number of representatives of passerine in New Zealand), you can track the correlation of such a function with a given set of queries.

In addition, the service allows you to manage at all without entering statistical data, but simply to track the frequency of repetition of any of group-specific queries. And another interesting point — the new service allows you to define queries that correlate with each other.

Naturally, the creators of the service do not guarantee a causal relationship between all these trends. May be correlated with each other can events and trends, for example, the occurrence of the query associated with football, may be correlated with a real function describing the change of the luminosity of a star. One can only imagine what a fantastic correlation can be passionate about, for example, spirituality, people. However, Google Correlate is quite interesting, and, I suppose, useful for those scientists, or marketers.

Via Googleblog

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru