Google Trends (GT) has become a popular data source among researchers in a wide variety of fields. In economics, its main use has been to forecast other economic variables such as tourism demand, unemployment or sales. This paper questions the quality of these data by discussing the main data quality aspects according to the literature. Our analysis evidences some non-negligible issues related to the measurement accuracy of GT, which potentially affects the results obtained with GT data and therefore the decisions made with this information. These issues are illustrated with an example in which some queries to GT are repeated on six different days.

The World Wide Web (WWW) has become the largest repository of information in the world, providing a data stream that grows at the same time as the scope of the Internet does in society. As with most Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), its digital nature makes it easy for computer programs to analyze it and discover information. This is why it is being increas­ingly explored as a source of new indicators of technology, economics and development. Web-based indicators can be made available on a real-time basis, unlike delayed official data releases. In this paper, we examine the viability of monitoring firm export orientation from automatically retrieved web variables. Our focus on exports is consistent with the role of internationalization in economic development. To evaluate our approach, we first checked to what extent web variables are capable of predicting firm export orientation. Once these new variables are validated, their automated re­trieval is assessed by comparing the predictive performance of two nowcast models: one considering the manually retrieved web variables, the other considering the automatically retrieved ones. Our results evidence that i) web-based variables are good predictors for firm export orientation, and ii) the process of extracting and analyzing such variables can be entirely automated with no significant loss of performance. This way, it is possible to nowcast not only the export orientation of a firm, but also of an economic sector or of a region.