This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher in D'Artata.

Got a minute?

Want to know what the most popular movies, albums, and video games are?

Ask the Internet.

But don't Google it. Check what other people

googled. That's the theory behind Google flu trends, which crunches search data to

forecast flu prevalence, with admittedly mixed results.

Nevertheless, researchers have applied the idea to the stock market.

They found that when searches related to business and politics go up,

the market tends to take a dive.

Quarries for words like election, Senate, and CEO are predictive of the downward trend,

but not terms like church, earthquake, and geometry.

Why the correlation?

The researchers say investors in the public may be more

likely to search for information on business and government when they're concerned about

the economy. And if confidence in the economy drops, so might stock prices.

The findings appear in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Over time, the correlation weakened,

a sign that traders may already be using internet search data in automated trading algorithms.

Generally speaking, if an opportunity like this is known, then the effect will diminish.

And that's what we think we're seeing in the data

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