Google Putting Crowd Wisdom to Work

daveperry writes "The Google Blog has a post about their use of prediction markets to forecast certain events that are relevant to their business. From the article: "Our search engine works well because it aggregates information dispersed across the web, and our internal predictive markets are based on the same principle: Googlers from across the company contribute knowledge and opinions which are aggregated into a forecast by the market. Sometimes, just feeling lucky isn't enough, and these tools can help." In related news, some software was recently open sourced that enables people to set up their own prediction markets."

Sounds Like Owise.com

[Crusader7]

I just recently started participating in it. Doesn't seem too complicated, though I'm still a bit unclear as to the relevancy of the predicitions it generates. It seems to me that for this sort of thing to work right, you'd need a much larger sampling (which maybe Google is hoping to get), but then, maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about?

Yay Delphi.

[Anonymous Coward]

And once again John Brunner wins. Can't believe the Shockwave Rider was written in 1975... compensated abstinence zone in New Orleans anyone?

For the lazy

[larry2k]

In related news, some software was recently open sourced that enables people to set up their own prediction markets.

Project Idea Futures
A web-based prediction market (Idea Futures) system. In prediction markets, the commodities traded are claims about future events; the market price gives a consensus probability about the event's likelihood of coming true.

http://ideafutures.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

I predict... using my wisdom

[Gopal.V]

I predict that google stock will rise ...

I've started playing Yahoo! Buzz games for a few months now (I dropped a virtual packet on FireFox). It's called Yahoo! Buzz game [yahoo.com]. These folks seem to gather their data from Yahoo ! search queries and from the logs on who clicked what. Which is why it seems to really follow the non-geek popularity levels too well - Google is what the geeks use (which is why I almost always seem to lose there).

This is just Google calling Market surveys by another name. I'm sure I can dig up a couple of WalMart papers about the same thing in the real world. Sort of vote with your money approach vs tell us approach (demand vs desire).

Re:Sheep

[SilentReallySilentUs]

You should read "Wisdom of Crowds" by James Soriecki. It is a very nice text on how, where, and why "collective wisdom" of a few average individuals is better than the wisdom of a few experts.

Re:Sheep

[SparafucileMan]

Well you should read "The Madness of Crowds". amazon [amazon.com]

the crowds don't know shit when it comes to financial markets.

zLabs' project zocalo

[Salamanders]

http://zocalo.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Great realtime prediction market, written in python, uses ajax for updates, very slick. (Disclaimer: I was an intern with zLabs over the summer and chatted with the developers often, very smart people)

Re:Awesome Mindpower!

[Anonymous Coward]

For those not in the know, this story was first written by Isaac Asimov, and he called it "The Last Question." Iirc, in Isaac's version the computer's last statement was "Let there be light"