After Tuesday’s post on gas prices and searches for hybrid vehicles and SUVs, I received several charting suggestions for leveraging the retail gas price data.
We’ve written extensively on the use of search term data as a way to gauge consumer sentiment. LeeAnn Prescott our U.S. Senior Analyst suggested that I produce a chart comparing retail gas prices to searches on “gas prices.”

A couple of interesting points from this chart… While we’d expect that consumer interest in gas prices would coincide with actual price peaks, its interesting to note that consumer interest at price peaks are 1) intense and 2) short lived.
During the holiday season, I posted some data in response to Tedeschi’s article in the NY Times that predicted a rise in online spending based on increased gas prices. Next week we’ll see, if in retrospect, we can shed some light on that prediction.