Google’s crystal ball is not something we can all play with

Jim Giles writes in the New Scientist this week about the buzz surrounding real-time web search. Giles is fascinated by the potential of this method of searching as a way of, effectively, predicting the future.

Giles says that Google researchers Hyunyoung Choi and Hal Varian have combined data from Google Trends with research done by economists on travel and home sales. By using economists’ data in conjunction with search terms, 15% of inaccuracies were eliminated.

The concept provides for interesting future possibilities. If we can use Google in conjunction with other data to predict future public moods, trends and wants, this could have massive implications for planning social media campaigns. A closer look, however, brings up a few holes in this theory.

Firstly, the fact that we may be able to predict future trends and plan campaigns based on those trends assumes that we can actually use Google rankings to our advantage. True, SEO does increase for a number of reasons such as amount of content, key word use, inbound links and so on, but Google algorithms are an inexact science. Only by paying for a place in Google’s rankings – which is extremely expensive – can you be sure of a return on your investment.

Secondly, predicting the future in this way, and using that information to push trends through social media, is simply a way of making new ideas popular without waiting to see how people naturally adopt ideas. Creating a craze online, however, may not be the most effective way of selling or publicising something. Online, trends are led by the best communicators, such as leading bloggers, heavy twitterers, and the people who make the best use of social media. As social media use rapidly becomes a science rather than a pastime, those leading communicators are more likely to be corporate executives than everyday people. So, not only will media trends be created by corporations, but they will only be followed by corporations as well. After all, which every day person has time to update their various profiles every minute, checking carefully that their entries are optimised for search engines to the best effect?

The use of the web to predict future trends may mark the next level in the digital revolution, but in taking amateur insight to the next level we may forget to consider the actual value of those future predictions.

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