“…Online search data represent the attention individuals pay to specific topics (Li and Law 2019 ). Previous research show that search engine query data has been used to forecast a variety of things, such as unemployment (Choi and Varian 2012 ; Suhoy 2009 ), housing (McLaren and Shanbhogue 2009 ; Wu and Brynjolfsson 2009 ), gun sales (Scott and Varian 2013 ), automobile purchases (Carriere-Swallow and Labbe 2011 ; Jun 2012 ), tourist inflow (Park et al 2017 ; Artola and Martinez Galán 2012 ), diseases (Ginsberg et al 2009 ; Althouse et al 2011 ), auto, house, retail and tourism (Choi and Varian 2009 ), feature films, video games and rank of song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (Goel et al 2010 ), private consumption (Schmidt and Vosen 2011 ), TV market (Youn and Cho 2016 ), algorithm offer (Fang and Chen 2016 ) and more. As can be seen from the above studies, many studies started to pay attention to Internet search data in terms of forecasts.…”