Google Trends: Is there any significant correlation between Google Search Volume Index and Actual World Trends?

Google Trends is a powerful tool in extracting and comparing searched terms through the time. It simply shows the increasing or decreasing of searching times for any term on the biggest search engine on the web. The goal of this paper is to find out whether Google Trends data has a significant correlation with the characteristics of the subject in the real world or not? For instance, is there any meaningful correlation between “volume search index” in Google Trends for a term like “Oil Price” and actual worldwide Oil price? This paper tests the hypothesis on two similar cases; “Oil Price” and “Gold Price” to answer the above question. Research findings have shown a strong correlation between Google Trends volume search index and actual real world data for both terms. We have concluded that Google Trends could be a valuable, fast and free tool to predict the trends of such a trends, although it definitely needs more studies for verification or generalize the method. Limitations of Google Trends and our research have been mentioned as well