Electronic money systems

In technical terms, electronic money is an online representation, or a system of debits and credits, used to exchange value within another system, or within itself as a stand alone system. In principle this process could also be done offline.
Occasionally, the term electronic money is also used to refer to the provider itself. A private currency may use gold to provide extra security, such as digital gold currency. Some private organizations, such as the United States armed forces use independent currencies such as Eagle Cash.

Centralised systems

Many systems—such as PayPal, WebMoney, Payoneer, cashU, and Hub Culture's Ven—will sell their electronic currency directly to the end user, but other systems only sell through third party digital currency exchangers.
In the case of Octopus card in Hong Kong, electronic money deposits work similarly to regular bank deposits. After Octopus Card Limited receives money for deposit from users, the money is deposited into a bank. This is similar to debit-card-issuing banks redepositing money at central banks.
In Kenya, the M-Pesa system is being used to transfer money through mobile phones.[2]
Some community currencies, like some local exchange trading systems (LETS) and the Community Exchange System, work with electronic transactions.

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Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. The horizontal axis of the main graph represents time (starting from 2004), and the vertical is how often a term is searched for relative to the total number of searches, globally.[1] Below the main graph, popularity is broken down by countries, regions, cities and language. Note that what Google calls "language", however, does not display the relative results of searches in different languages for the same term(s). It only displays the relative combined search volumes from all countries that share a particular language (see "flowers" vs "fluers"). It is possible to refine the main graph by region and time period. On August 5, 2008, Google launched Google Insights for Search, a more sophisticated and advanced service displaying search trends data. On September 27, 2012, Google merged Google Insights for Search into Google Trends. [2]


Background

Google Trends also allows the user to compare the volume of searches between two or more terms. An additional feature of Google Trends is in its ability to show news related to the search-term overlaid on the chart, showing how new events affect search popularity.
Originally, Google neglected updating Google Trends on a regular basis. In March 2007, internet bloggers noticed that Google had not added new data since November 2006, and Trends was updated within a week. Google did not update Trends from March until July 30, and only after it was blogged about, again.[3] Google now claims to be "updating the information provided by Google Trends daily; Hot Trends is updated hourly."
On August 6, 2008, Google launched a free service called Insights for Search. Insights for Search is an extension of Google Trends and although the tool is meant for marketers, it can be utilized by any user. The tool allows for the tracking of various words and phrases that are typed into Google’s search-box. The tracking device provided a more-indepth analysis of results. It also has the ability to categorize and organize the data, with special attention given to the breakdown of information by geographical areas.[4] In 2012, the Insights for Search has been merged into Google Trends with a new interface.
Evidence is provided by Jeremy Ginsberg et al. that Google Trends data can be used to track influenza-like illness in a population.[5] Because the relative frequency of certain queries is highly correlated with the percentage of physician visits in which a patient presents with influenza-like symptoms, an estimate of weekly influenza activity can be reported. Furthermore, it was shown by Tobias Preis et al. that there is a correlation between Google Trends data of company names and transaction volumes of the corresponding stocks on a weekly time scale.[6][7]
In April 2012, Tobias Preis, Helen Susannah Moat, H. Eugene Stanley and Steven R. Bishop used Google Trends data to demonstrate that Internet users from countries with a higher per capita gross domestic product (GDP) are more likely to search for information about the future than information about the past. The findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, suggest there may be a link between online behaviour and real-world economic indicators.[8][9][10] The authors of the study examined Google search queries made by Internet users in 45 different countries in 2010 and calculated the ratio of the volume of searches for the coming year (‘2011’) to the volume of searches for the previous year (‘2009’), which they call the ‘future orientation index’. They compared the future orientation index to the per capita GDP of each country and found a strong tendency for countries in which Google users enquire more about the future to exhibit a higher GDP. The results hint that there may potentially be a relationship between the economic success of a country and the information-seeking behaviour of its citizens online.

Google Hot Trends

Google Hot Trends is an addition to Google Trends which displays the top 20 hot, i.e., fastest rising, searches (search-terms) of the past hour in the United States. This is for searches that have recently experienced a sudden surge in popularity.[11] For each of the search-terms, it provides a 24-hour search-volume graph as well as blog, news and web search results. Hot Trends has a history feature for those wishing to browse past hot searches. Hot Trends can be installed as an iGoogle Gadget. Hot Trends is also available as an hourly Atom web feed.

Google Trends for websites

Since 2008 there has been a sub-section of Google Trends which analyses traffic for websites, rather than traffic for search terms. This is a similar service to that provided by Alexa Internet. The Google Trends for Websites became unavailable after the September 27th, 2012 release of the new google trends product[12]

Google Trends API

An API to accompany the Google Trends service was announced by Marissa Mayer, vice president of search-products at Google. This was announced in 2007, and so far has not been released.[13]
A few unofficial Google Trends API tools have been released, along with a wiki detailing them and simple access to Google Trends data.

Implications of data

A group of researchers at Wellesley College examined data from Google Trends and analyzed how effective a tool it could be in predicting U.S. Congressional elections in 2008 and 2010. In highly contested races where data for both candidates were available, the data successfully predicted the outcome in 33.3% of cases in 2008 and 39% in 2010. The authors conclude that, compared to the traditional methods of election forecasting, incumbency and New York Times polls, and even in comparison with random chance, Google Trends did not prove to be a good predictor of either the 2008 or 2010 elections.[14]

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