FORTUNE — As occupiers step up their occupations of Wall Street and other places across the U.S., demanding that the financial industry be held accountable for putting the economy at risk and for sucking up the nation’s wealth at the expense of the “99%,” a couple of finance professors have taken on the important question of whether analyzing Google (GOOG) search data can actually help investors guess which stocks will rise.
Their answer is yes. “We propose a new and direct measure of investor attention using search frequency in Google,” write Notre Dame University’s Zhi Da and Paul Gao in the Journal of Finance. Freakonomics characterizes the study as concluding that analyzing Google search data is a “better, more direct method of measuring investor attention (a precursor to buying the stock) than traditional, indirect methods of measurement, such as news and advertising expense.”
The professors analyzed a sample of Russell 3000 stocks from 2004 to 2008. They concluded that an increase in the frequency of Google searches “predicts higher stock prices in the [following] 2 weeks and an eventual price reversal within the year. It also contributes to the large first-day return and long-run underperformance of IPO stocks.”
“Moreover,” Freakonomics writes, “less sophisticated investors and individuals are more likely to use a Google search for information related to stocks.”
Of course, as with all publicly available information, once a lot of people start using it, the less advantageous it is. So the academics’ proposal that investors use the data might effectively do itself in. On the other hand, the Freakonomics blog entry so far has attracted zero comments. So by all means, give it a shot. But, shhhhhh.
