Showing posts with label trend. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trend. Show all posts

May 25, 2011

Google Hits on Actuary

Google can be a great help for actuaries. Especially 'Google Insights' and 'Google Trends' are two useful applications for retrieving relative Google Search Hits data from the Internet.

Google Insights Example
Let's dive a little deeper into Google Insights and start with researching the relative development of the number of hits on the word 'Actuary'.
Here is the result (period 2004-2011-May, extracted csv-file, Excel-Graph):


Explanation
The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term (e.g. 'Actuary'), relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don't represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100. Each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100.

Conclusion
Clear is that the search for (the word) actuary is relatively declining from 2004 to May 2011.

To keep the actuarial profession virtually alive we'll need to make more noise as actuaries on the Internet.

Step outside, spread the (acturial) word, make yourself visible in the outer world and let people wonder:  'who's that?',  'what a professional', 'what's his job?', 'Actuary?', 'I will google it!'.

So let's Twitter and Blog to get more actuarial exposure...


Actual Data
Apart from generating these kind of relative time-data, Google Insights can generate actual data anywhere on any web-application or presentation.

This way your data will always be up to date!
Moreover Google Insights is easy to handle without any code knowledge.....


Some examples....

(1) Actual relative development of the number of hits on the word 'Actuary'


(2) Top searches and rising searches on Google for the word 'Actuary'

More applications
The next example shows how you may use Google Highlights as a market crash predictor.  


It turns out that in advance of the 2008 market crash, Google searches on "Stock market crash" increased...

Make you own discoveries, highlights or trends (e.g 'Solvency II') and enjoy!


Related Links:
- Actuaries on Twitter
- Google Insights 
- S&P 500 Data 
- How Google Trends and Internet Searches Correlate with Asset Prices
- Google trends: 21 May 2011: End of the world, predicted by Harold Camping