Google Trends predicted the Iowa Caucus?
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.
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.
