In search of art: rapid estimates of gallery and museum visits using Google Trends

Measuring collective human behaviour has traditionally been a time-consuming and expensive process, impairing the speed at which data can be made available to decision makers in policy. Can data generated through widespread use of online services help provide faster insights? Here, we consider an example relating to policymaking for culture and the arts: publicly funded museums and galleries in the UK. We show that data on Google searches for...