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Google Putting Crowd Wisdom to Work

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the just-don't-start-a-stampede dept.

daveperry writes "The Google Blog has a post about their use of prediction markets to forecast certain events that are relevant to their business. From the article: "Our search engine works well because it aggregates information dispersed across the web, and our internal predictive markets are based on the same principle: Googlers from across the company contribute knowledge and opinions which are aggregated into a forecast by the market. Sometimes, just feeling lucky isn't enough, and these tools can help." In related news, some software was recently open sourced that enables people to set up their own prediction markets."

4 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Yay Delphi. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    And once again John Brunner wins. Can't believe the Shockwave Rider was written in 1975... compensated abstinence zone in New Orleans anyone?

  2. Re:Sheep by SilentReallySilentUs · · Score: 4, Informative

    You should read "Wisdom of Crowds" by James Soriecki. It is a very nice text on how, where, and why "collective wisdom" of a few average individuals is better than the wisdom of a few experts.

    --
    Explore your creative side
  3. Re:Sheep by SparafucileMan · · Score: 3, Informative
    Well you should read "The Madness of Crowds". amazon

    the crowds don't know shit when it comes to financial markets.

  4. zLabs' project zocalo by Salamanders · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://zocalo.sourceforge.net/

    Great realtime prediction market, written in python, uses ajax for updates, very slick. (Disclaimer: I was an intern with zLabs over the summer and chatted with the developers often, very smart people)