A lot of eyes are on Greece today. How will the people vote in the referendum on the EU bailout diktats/proposals? Pollsters are telling us it is too close to call. But maybe there is a much easier way to foretell how this vote will go.
Google trends allows us to see which search terms are becoming more or less active/popular over time. So I used it to see what is happening for “oxi” and “nai”, the Greek terms we see in nearly every article on the topic. This is what it cranks out for search from within Greece (click image to enlarge it):
Source: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=oxi%2C%20nai&geo=GR&date=1%2F2015%2012m
This shows the trends for the last 12 months. We can see that both search terms have shot up recently, which is not surprising of course. What is more surprising is that search for “oxi” has been significantly bigger than search for “nai”. This can have several reasons. Maybe there is a majority that is going to vote no (oxi) and that is being reflected in more Greek search hits. Or maybe the people who intend to vote yes (nai) do not use the internet as much as the no voters. That could be the case if a majority of older people intend to vote yes. Or maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle.
By tomorrow we will find out if Google trends offered a better indication than the opinion polls.
Danny
LunaticTrader 