Activity on the web can provide more than a snapshot of what
people are interested in on a given day. It is also being used,
with some success, to predict future stock prices and election
results. Tools such as Google Trends and Blogpulse track what
people are talking or thinking about by recording the frequency
with which words are entered into search engines and appear on
blog sites. Now Peter Gloor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology is going a step further, and using the web to make
specific predictions. His software, called Condor, has predicted
the results of an Italian political party's internal election
and successfully forecast stock market fluctuations. Gloor's
secret is a property of networks called "betweenness". Condor
starts by taking an ordinary search term - the name of a
political candidate or a company - and plugging it into ... To
continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to
all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.