The authors of this paper state that financial markets are a prime target for investigating the prediction of market movements based upon the social habits of people searching for and gathering information to gain a competitive advantage in order to capture opportunities for personal financial gain.

They go on to investigate whether search query data from Google Trends can historically be used to provide insights into the information gathering process that leads up to making trading decisions in the stock market.

The authors gather data from Google Trends and Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) for the period of 2004-01-01 to 2011-02-28. They seed the process with some financial terms (specifically the term, debt) that can yield a bias towards the search for financial results. They take the initial set of terms and then build a larger set of terms using Google Sets to suggest more search terms based upon the seed...