One aspect of the IEER ad hoc business climate research project is an attempt to examine the applicability of Google Insights for Search to study household consumption, the progress of retail sales turnover, and current car sales trends in Hungary. There have been several successful attempts to use Google data in a similar fashion, usually in connection with U.S. economic indicators. Our goal, however, is to analyse the consumption indicators based on Internet search traffic in a country where Internet penetration lags behind U.S. and Western European levels.

Our results show that Google can also be a useful tool for estimating present consumption patterns in a country where Internet use is less prevalent compared to developed countries. For retail and car sales, as well as household consumption, we found that the indicators based on Google performed well in providing trend estimates for the given reference time series.