People in wealthier nations are far more likely to search for information about the future compared with citizens of poorer states, a study of 45 billion Google search queries by University College London researchers has revealed.

The study reveals a “striking correlation” between a country’s per-capita gross domestic product “and its inhabitants’ predisposition to look forward.”

They used Google Trends to analyse search queries made in 45 countries in 2010. Their methodology for sifting past and future searches was to count how many 2010 searches included the term “2009” and how many mentioned “2011.”

Counting year mentions is clearly an imperfect way to check feelings about the past and future, and to avoid statistical noise in the Google Trends data the study eliminated nations with less than 5 million Internet users – many of which will be at the poorer end of the GDP scale where the correlation may falter.