
The Google Unemployment Index - keyle
http://www.google.com/finance?q=GOOGLEINDEX_US:UNEMPL
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nostrademons
Anyone know what the spike surrounding July 23 was? Was there some
announcement for unemployment data and associated stock market jump then? It
seems far above the normal unemployment claims over the last 2 years, and then
dropped back down to normal.

Edit: answering my own question with the help of Google Custom Date Range
search:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=unemployment&tbs=cdr:1,cd...](http://www.google.com/search?q=unemployment&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:7/10/2010,cd_max:7/31/2010)

The senate passed a law extending unemployment benefits on July 20, so I bet
everybody affected for it saw the news story and searched to find out how the
law affected them.

~~~
pointillistic
The spike in July 2010 was the month long debate between republicans and
democrats (and in the press) about The H.R.4213 - Unemployment Compensation
Extension Act. <http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h4213/show>

Passed in Senate: July 20, 2010. Passed in Congress: July 22, 2010. Signed by
President Obama: July 23, 2010.

[http://www.worldcorrespondents.com/unemployment-extension-
ju...](http://www.worldcorrespondents.com/unemployment-extension-
july-23-2010-update-obama-signs-unemployment-benefits-extension-bill/887875)

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troymc
There's an interesting seasonal trend: a decline at the end of the calendar
year, followed by a big jump in January. Why? Do lots of US people
traditionally get laid off on Dec. 31? (The data is for US search traffic.)

~~~
korch
A possible contributing factor just popped into my head, and only applies to a
small subset of the tech industry. I know from experience that big tech
companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and undoubtedly many others, all have
significant numbers of workers who are non-exempt contractors(i.e. not direct
employees). I don't know how much labor laws vary from state to state, but in
WA they are legally bared from employing these special contractors for longer
than 11 months. After 11 months they have to convert them to direct employees.
So in order to shirk the law and evade paying equal benefits, salaries,
options, and corporate taxes, these companies dismiss those contractors for 30
days, then re-hire them. At least in Washington state, this is a standard
practice for the past decade or so. There are many loop holes and exceptions,
so I'm not even sure of the extent to which this contractor law is applicable.

At Microsoft or Amazon, at least a few years ago when I saw the HR numbers, at
any given time, ~20% of the total pool of workers can be temp contractors, so
that is a sizable numbers of workers coming and going each December, at least
on paper, even if those workers stay on as contractors for many years. (As an
aside, I've always wondered why this doesn't generate the same amount of bad
PR as the entire video game industry, especially the "EA slave-ship").

I don't have nearly as much direct experience outside of the software
industry, but I imagine other industries are doing likewise and on a far
broader scale.

Extending this employment pattern to the whole economy, it might explain a big
percentage of these mysterious to pin-down "seasonal workers." Or perhaps the
labor statistics are just being fudged across the board(thanks US BLS!), from
the top down, to try to keep a lid on the worsening unemployment and
underemployment situation. I suspect it's a lot of both.

Since the 70's America has been hemorrhaging "real jobs"—i.e. non-service-
sector jobs that actually pay an inflation adjusted living wage. Those of us
fortunate enough to win the career lottery by going into tech have been quite
shielded from the backdrop of the economic decline, and the mass exporting of
(manufacturing mostly?) jobs to overseas.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Why do you believe service sector jobs are not "real jobs"?

~~~
korch
Because they pay under $20/hr, offer no health insurance, dental, no vacation,
termination at will, and little possibility for promotion or advancement of
skills. That and the balance of power is entirely skewed towards some MBA in a
monkey-suit sitting in a corp HQ palace hundreds or thousands of miles away,
who only looks at numbers on a spreadsheet or pretty pictures on a powerpoint
that represent the lives of human beings. It's not only coders who should
never be called "resources"—the same basic decency applies to all humans.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_Because they pay under $20/hr, offer no health insurance, dental, no
vacation, termination at will, and little possibility for promotion or
advancement of skills._

Half of this is mostly true, the other half is mostly not true. Tons of major
companies in the service sector offer their employees (even their part-time
employees) health, dental, and vacation. And employment should pretty much
always be termination at will, unless the employee is under a contract and
can't leave whenever _they_ want, or is fired due to a protected class,
whistleblowing, etc.

~~~
Terretta
That "should" is definitely debatable, and mostly culturally informed rather
than reasoned. Balance of power and marginal impact of a termination is skewed
against the individual.

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bradly
Anyone know if the graph accounts for increases/decreases in Google's overall
traffic or its index size?

~~~
pierrefar
That was my first question, so for now, I'm thinking of it as useful for
analysis of only short time frames. The assumption here is that in a given
3-month period, the volume of searches is probably sufficiently similar.

This would break down near the end of the year in the USA when the volume of
searches goes up as people shop online.

~~~
nostrademons
[http://www.google.com/support/insights/bin/answer.py?answer=...](http://www.google.com/support/insights/bin/answer.py?answer=87284&cbid=-1f47pvjh7r7j1&src=cb&lev=index)

I'd guess that the normalization process also applies over time as well, i.e.
they compare the number of searches you're interested in vs. the total number
of searches within that population.

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pixelcloud
It is interesting how the stock markets have done compared to the unemployment
index. I wonder what that indicates?

~~~
ramkalari
The stock market indices are declining starting mid-2007 just as the
unemployment index starts rising. But,the markets seem to be holding ok even
though the unemployment queries have started increasing of late.

