Google Trends 2.0 (beta?) - Predicts the future

NY Times blogger, Steven D. Levitt on the 10th of May, in his blog, discusses Google predicting the present and an interesting hypothesis that morning traffic volume is an indicator of daily economic activity.

In a comment on his blog, seeing as no one is committing on mine, I discussed the possibility of Google predicting the future and becoming evil (tongue in cheek).

From: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/varian-google-trends-pr...

That is a very interesting thought Steve, regarding traffic volume as an indicator of economic activity. I have never heard that before. I bet you are right, on most days, when accidents and breakdowns are not greater than average. Actually I bet that the number of accidents would be a fairly good indicator of the volume of traffic. You can see it now on morning traffic shows... "Hey the current economic indicator this morning is 2.3" :)

Nice idea, someone will have the traffic data set, however the point is.... Google.

Which brings me to a response to Joe Smith's comment.
"There are people who have real time data on the economy... Any issuer of credit cards knows in real time what consumer behavior is."
So do you Joe, we all do an a huge number of things. twitter, Google, stock market realtime values, etc. However there is no organisation on the planet that even comes close to Google when it comes to being able to process and analyse data. That gives Google the edge over everyone.

It is a shame that recently they dropped their motto of "Don't be evil", quietly albeit:
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2009/04/google_quietly.php

I think that the motto gave a little unique curiousity to Google, that somehow it was OK to trust them. It was there core value. I personally think that it is a sign that Google can know longer be trusted. It may seems like a small thing, however thinking about the implications that the motto has on the expectation and work ethic that someone thinks they have to have when they work there, probably had a fairly significant impact on new and current employees. I think that this probably played out at Google in a unique way, as the crowd of people that were involved in building Google must have seen the incredible thing that was happening, more than anyone else. Having that "Don't be evil", not in a religious way but in a moral way in the back of their minds must have had some bearing on their perception of their work and what was indeed happening.

I do not think that Google can only predict the present, I think Google can probably already predict the near future, in hours, days and possibly weeks, depending on the trend that is being analysed. It must be possible to have a algorithm that analyses for trends. Realisitically it can not be that hard, lets take the CDC's flu data set and relate it to Google's search query records on flu. Actually we do not have to as Google has done it for us:
http://www.google.org/about/flutrends/how.html

Also to complete the reference to the above data, here are the Google new Experimental Flu Trends:

http://www.google.org/flutrends/intl/en_mx/
http://www.google.org/flutrends/

It is definitely Google Trends on speed. Which is the key thing. Google has the speed to analyse realtime data and analyses realtime changes against historical trends of their own data set and that of other parties, e.g. the CDC or the stock market. It cannot be hard to develop an algorithm that monitors for the significant deviation on a trend's historical mean or deviation. Now they will not get it right every time, but they will get better at it with time.

Google will predict the future and if not Google, some clever person that manages to use Google in that manner as a lot of Google's data set is available to anyone, so is twitter's, etc. This data is available to everyone and if Google do not figure out how to do it, it is just a matter of time until someone else does. We already have the ability (the realtime data) to predict the near future on a number of different things.

All grist to the grey matter... we do live in interesting times.