Web: Tool Predicts Election Results and Stock Prices

Web Tool Predicts Election Results and Stock Prices
New Scientist (02/11/08)No. 2642, P. 30; Palmer, Jason
Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Peter Gloor has developed Condor, software that monitors activity on the Web to predict the future of stock prices and election results. Condor has successfully predicted the results of an Italian political party's internal election as well as stock market fluctuations. Condor starts by taking a search term, such as the name of a political candidate or a company, and running it through a Google search. Condor then takes the URLs of the top 10 results and plugs them into the Google search field, prefaced with the term "link:". Google then returns the sites that link to the 10 original sites, which Condor then reinserts into Google. Condor then maps the links between all the sites it has found, even if they do not contain the original search term, and finds the shortest way to get from one site to the other through the links they contain. The more often a site is involved in moving between sites, the higher its "betweenness" score. Condor averages the betweenness scores for all of the sites to produce an overall score for the original search term. The score provides some indication of popularity. In December of 2006, Gloor entered a range of film titles from that year and found that of the 10 with the highest betweenness scores, five won Oscars, four were nominated, and only one did not receive an award. Gloor is working on altering Condor so that it only searches blogs or chat sites.
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