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Activity on the web can provide more than a snapshot of what people are interested in on a given day. It is also being used, with some success, to predict future stock prices and election results.

07 February 2008, New Scientist, by Jason Palmer

Tools such as Google Trends and Blogpulse track what people are talking or thinking about by recording the frequency with which words are entered into search engines and appear on blog sites. Now Peter Gloor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is going a step further, and using the web to make specific predictions. His software, called Condor, has predicted the results of an Italian political party's internal election and successfully forecast stock market fluctuations. "The program predicted the candidates' order nearly as well as the exit polls"

Gloor's secret is a property of networks called "betweenness". Condor starts by taking an ordinary search term - the name of a political candidate or a company - and plugging it into the Google web search engine. It then takes the URLs of the top 10 hits returned by Google and plugs them back into the Google search field, prefaced with the term "link:". In response, Google returns the sites that link to the 10 original sites. Condor then repeats the process with the new set of sites.

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