One of the strongest leading indicators of economic activity is the number of people who file for unemployment benefits. Macroeconomists Robert Gordon and James Hamilton have recently examined the historical evidence. According to Hamilton's summary: "... in each of the last six recessions, the...

Can Google queries help predict economic activity?The answer depends on what you mean by "predict." Google Trends and Google Insights for Search provide a real time report on query volume, while economic data is typically released several days after the close of the month. Given this time lag,...

There has been significant interest from the travel industry in using search data to predict hotel bookings and other travel-related expenditures in advance. When we compared Google Trends data with a reference travel dataset from Smith Travel Research, Inc, we find that searches for travel take...

The display ads targeting has been centered around the site context and the audience. Compared to the search ads, the ads effectiveness of display ads has been questioned. The recent development in the demand side advertising platform allows advertisers to bid on individual ad impressions and it...