Google starts an internal futures market

September 26, 2005 5:51 AM

Google's Crystal Ball::NYTimes. Quite interesting...Via TechDirt:

Google has created a predictive market system, basically a way for its employees to bet on the likelihood of possible events. Such markets have long been used to predict world events, like election results. Intrade, part of the Trade Exchange Network, allows people to bet on elections, stock market indexes and even the weather, for example.

I wonder how accurate the aggregated content of blogs would be to measure the likelihood of prospective real world events? The economist they consulted, Hal R. Varian, has some interesting links on his web page as well. I think that the internet better get their anti-spam technology up to par before we have people "gaming" the future through blogspam. For an explanation of Futures Markets (charts), see this page at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
posted by rzklkng (5 comments total)

What makes Google's system any different from any others?

The idea of using, effectively, search results, is interesting. Especially in light of Google's moves into mail and IM, which they've made clear are fair game for their analysis. Your point about people gaming the system is well-taken. It's very cyberpunk, the thought of a few hackers attempting to sway global predictive models with chatbots.
posted by mkultra at 6:34 AM on September 26, 2005

The Google blog discussed this the other day. The system does not use searches or search results, it uses employees opinions. Granted, Googlers are probably pretty well-connected and informed, as webizens go, which probably accounts for the accuracy.
posted by Plutor at 6:42 AM on September 26, 2005

Sounds a lot like the DARPA FutureMAP project, eh?
posted by warbaby at 8:51 AM on September 26, 2005

The book "The Fourth Turning" goes into soem depth regarding the cyclical nature of history and how events can be predicted to some degree using history as a tool.

I think the granularity and precision timewise are the keys to accurate predictions.
posted by nofundy at 9:49 AM on September 26, 2005

nofundy: "The book "The Fourth Turning" goes into soem depth regarding the cyclical nature of history and how events can be predicted to some degree using history as a tool."

OT, I'm reading that thing right now. It's a deep, dense, genius tome. It's going to take me forever to get through it. It reminds me of some of my books for Humanities courses at college.
posted by Plutor at 10:00 AM on September 26, 2005