Is Google Trends a quality data source?

ABSTRACT

Google Trends (GT) has become a popular data source among researchers in a wide variety of fields. In economics, its main use has been to forecast other economic variables such as tourism demand, unemployment or sales. This paper questions the quality of these data by discussing the main data quality aspects according to the literature. Our analysis evidences some non-negligible issues related to the measurement accuracy of GT, which potentially affects the results obtained with GT data and therefore the decisions made with this information. These issues are illustrated with an example in which some queries to GT are repeated on six different days.

KEYWORDS:

• Google Trends
• data quality
• measurement error
• online data

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C22
• E27

Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by grants PID2019-107765RB-I00 and PEJ2018-003267-A-AR, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ESF Investing in your future”.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Finance, Industry and Competitiveness and the European Social Fund [PEJ2018-003267-A-AR]; Agencia Estatal de Investigación [PID2019-107765RB-I00].