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Toward the near future: social trend-based decisions
Social media are more and more employed as indicators of public opinions of the real-world phenomena (Zhang et al. , 2014; Gao et al. , 2014; Xia et al. , 2014), from epidemiology, that tries to predict the crash of pandemic diseases (Ginsberg et al. , 2009), to economy, interested in how correlated are job-related queries with the rise and fall of unemployment rate. Furthermore, political science uses search query data to recognize patterns about the amount of political contributions raised by candidates. Other such examples can be found in the literature.
These ongoing trends exploit social search behaviors (Lagre et al. , 2015) and sentiments (Liu, 2005) as cues for consumers and sellers' decisions (Dhar and Simonson, 2003)[1]. In fact, thanks to the availability of the aggregated frequency of search queries[2] from some search engines services, such as those provided by Google Trends[3], these new kinds of search services, also known as query of search queries[4], become their own new social media the content of which, just trends of search, is created by users.
Actually, thanks to Google Trends, they have been demonstrated several examples of how the search volume for keywords coincides with as many patterns, showing how these kinds of correlation hold for many local phenomena. Think of the case of the keyword Summer camp, as reported by Webb (2009), whose number of searches seem to increase when the end of the school year is approaching, probably because of parents Summer recreation plans for their kids. The same seems to happen for Internal Revenue Service keyword, on April 15, when the tax deadline in USA is approaching.
But the story does not end here; in fact, it is just begun. For instance, it seems that media providers, more and more, look at Google Trends in order to determine the hot topics for their editorial content. Actually, the goal is "all about getting more hits from Google"[5]. For instance, a popular political site could benefit by looking at the current hot queries and, consequently, writing down a post on the site containing focused keywords so that Google can quickly index the post. These are just some of the many strategies adopted by SEO practitioners (Yun