How search queries can predict the future
May 15, 2009 by CGP Staff
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Google researchers combined data from search queries with models used by economists to predict trends in areas such as travel and home sales. The results provided better forecasts in almost every case. More at NewScientist.com. Still, perhaps nothing rivals films yet as objects for analyzing societies’ trends, values, fears, hopes and expectations for the future. As German sociologist and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once wrote “movies mirror the psychological tendencies, the deep profound strata of the collective mind that runs below the conscious dimension [of a certain society].”