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How Google Can Predict Elections
- swGooF 15y agoThe results are so close it is almost scary. It does make sense that the most popular candidate will get the most searches.
- Kell 15y agoSeems to be a coincidence for me. If you do it only for Hollande and Aubry, now. The results are the same... Aubry 29 Hollande 39, difficult to prdict a second turn with more than 30% not turning up. We'll see next sunday if it's a coincidence or no.
- bambax 15y agoIt's very much a coincidence; amongst the "top searches" for "hollande", "la hollande" comes third. "la hollande" is the country Netherlands, and has absolutely nothing to do with the man of the same name.
- danvideo 15y agoThis sounds like one of those phenomenons that suffers when too many people find out about it. The more it's written about, tested, and the more people in the disgruntled minority (or majority) with what appears to be the statistics on a given Monday --- the less accurate this'll likely be on Tuesday... rest of the time.
- libria 15y agoReminds me of Asimov's "psychohistory". He conceived of a science capable predicting future events with probabilities but two of its foundational principles are that 1) the population sample is sufficiently large 2) the population is unaware that they are being observed or unaware of the variables/mechanisms used to predict their future. Part of what made his writing interesting was that this science was very believable.
- andos 15y agoYes, how?
- beej71 15y agoThose google numbers are 30-day averages, so it's possible to get plenty more than 100%. Looks like coincidence. In the US now we have: michele bachmann 14 herman cain 36 mitt romney 11 ron paul 34 rick perry 33 All that said, I will be watching Insights and Trends now to see how it pans out. It might be coincidence, but it's potentially very interesting coincidence.
- recusancy 15y agoI tried it for the GOP presidential primary. mitt romney 11 rick perry 33 herman cain 36 michele bachmann 14 ron paul 34 So I guess it's Cain or Perry with Romney not standing a chance? Also: perry 73 obama 67 romney 9 obama 72 In MA: scott brown 0 elizabeth warren 31
- MatthewPhillips 15y agoSeems like selection bias to me. Voters who search for candidates are a subset of all voters. Plenty of voters (probably a shocking majority) watch the commercials and that's the extent of their research.
- MaxGabriel 15y agoRon Paul got better results than Perry, but he's not in your top two? If anything this demonstrates a major flaw in using this technique to predict elections (as much as I wish Ron Paul got the nomination)
- bdr 15y agoGoogle is getting thought samples from the brains of a billion people. Whether this particular method is valid or not, I expect they can make such predictions, and more. Flu trends, elections, real estate by region, box-office openings, popular conflict ("why are Tutsis so..."), traffic, stock prices in some cases ("xbox red light", "how to buy krispy kreme stock")...
- partoa 15y agoAnd pollsters just had their job made easier, until people figure out how to play it.