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Wanna know what the most popular movies, albums and video games are?
想了解最近流行什么电影，唱片及电子游戏？
Ask the internet.
问问互联网就可以知晓。
But don't Google it. Check what other people Googled.
但是不要用谷歌搜索。看看其他人都搜索了什么。
That's the theory behind Google Flu Trends—which crunches search data to forecast flu prevalence.
这就是谷歌流感趋势背后的理论—通过搜索数据来预测流行趋势。
With admittedly mixed results.
而结果应该是好坏参半。
Nevertheless, researchers have applied the idea to the stock market.
尽管如此研究人员还是将这一观点运用于股票市场。
They found that when searches related to business and politics go up, the market tends to take a dive.
他们发现，当商业和政治的相关搜索增多时，市场就有暴跌的倾向。
Queries for words like "election," "senate," and "CEO" are predictive of the downward trend—but not terms like "church," "earthquake" and "geometry."
而当涉及“选举”、“参议员”及“首席执行官”这类词汇时，就会预示着市场下跌的趋势，而“教堂”、“地震”及“几何学”等则不会带来这样的效果。
Why the correlation?
为什么会产生这样的关联?
The researchers say investors and the public may be more likely to search for information on business and government when they're concerned about the economy.
研究人员表示投资者和公众对经济状况前景表示堪忧时，他们更倾向于搜索商业和政府等的相关信息。
And if confidence in the economy drops, so might stock prices.
而且如果他们对经济的信心下降，股票的价格也会下降。
The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
这项研究已经在《美国国家科学院院刊》上发表。
Over time, the correlation weakened—a sign that traders may already be using Internet search data in automated trading algorithms.
随着时间的推移，这种关联性会变弱—有迹象表明股市交易员可能已经将网络搜索数据用于自动交易运算。
"Generally speaking, if an opportunity like this is known, then the effect will diminish,
“一般来讲，如果已经知道有这种可能性，那么其产生的效果就会减弱。
and that's what we think we're seeing in the data we looked at, from 2004 to 2012."
这就是我们认为要在2004至2012年这些数据中所能发现的东西。”
Lead author Chester Curme, a research fellow at the Warwick Business School.
华威商学院首席研究员首席作者柯斯特柯尔姆说道。
And before you head over to Google Trends, he says, keep this in mind:
他也表示在进行搜索趋势查询时你要铭记一点：
"If somebody knows that other traders use this method, then a predatory trader could manipulate search volumes on Google artificially in order to deceive other traders."
“如果有人知道有其他交易员使用这种方法，那么一位不怀好意的交易员为了欺骗其他人员，就会在谷歌上人为操控这些搜索数据。
As they say in the biz: past performance does not guarantee future results.
正如商界人士经常挂在嘴边的:过去的表现并不能保证未来的结果。
