Jul 09 2007
The Butterfly Effect.. or is it just coincidence?
The NY Times had an interesting article today about the eerie postings of death predictions in Wikipedia like the most recent one regarding the death of Nancy Benoit. The article moves into discussing the fine line between real-time late breaking news and predicting future events. I have to admit that I find this article disturbing but yet on some level intriguing. The article gets better once you can get past all the weird death notable mentions. One thing it reminded me of was the notion of Bill Tancer’s ‘searchonomics’ theory.
Bill Tancer, GM of Hitwise, initially proposed thoughts back in 2005 on ‘searchonomics’ and predicting consumer interest or rather public fear of possible a epidemic outbreak based on search history on the technical term “H5N1” and it’s more consumer friendly version “bird flu”. He has also dabbled with more fun data and predicting winners for American Idol and the UK version of Dancing with the Stars – both of which he was right on the money with predicting the winners.
I have found ‘searchonomics’ rather an interesting phenomenon that I thought I’d start my own predictions to see if there is any predictive power on the 2008 presidential candidates.
Unfortunately I don’t work for Hitwise, nor do I own a membership either; so I am limited to free versions of similar data – which limits my visibility a little. Using Google Trends you can see the early few months of the year on some of the top Democratic candidates:
Based on the traffic so far, it looks like it’s going to be a close race at this point. I’ll wait to make my predictions on the democratic side as soon as Google Trends decides to update their data a bit more (or if someone is willing to pull data in some fancier tool with more up to date data and send it my way, I might be able to make my prediction sooner).
Is this ‘searchenomics’ phenomenon the result of a “Butterfly Effect” or is it just a set of data points that are merely related by coincidence?
Until next time… safe analyzing.