Random thoughts and Technology04 Jan 2008 07:47 pm

Back in July 2006, I wrote a post titled Predicting the Future With Google Trends in which I described how Google Trends, which measures the relative search volume of keywords on Google, could have been used to reveal the relative popularity of real-world phenomena, such as who will win American Idol.

Out of curiosity, I pulled up 30-day trailing data for both the republic and democratic presidential candidates and compared it to the actual Iowa Caucus results yesterday.

democratic iowa caucus google trends
democratic caucus iowa results

republican iowa caucus google trends
republic caucus iowa results

Is it just me or was Google Trends a remarkably accurate predictor of yesterday’s result! I tried specifying trend data for only Iowa however it seems as if there isn’t quite enough data to draw any meaningful conclusion.

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