Predicting Election Results With Google

destinyland writes "Google announced they've searched for clues about the upcoming US election using their internal tools (as well as its 'Insights for Search' tool, which compares search volume patterns for different regions and timeframes.) 'Looking at the most popular searches on Google News in October, the issues that stand out are the economy,' their official blog reported, adding, 'we continue to see many searches for terms like unemployment and foreclosures, as well as immigration and health care.' But one technology reporter also notes almost perfect correspondence between some candidate's predicted vote totals from FiveThirtyEight and their current search volume on Google, with only a small margin of error for other candidates. 'Oddly enough, the race with a clear link between web interest and expected voting is the unusual three-way contest [in Florida], where the breakdown between candidates should if anything be less clear-cut and predictable.' And Google adds that also they're seeing national interest in one California proposition — which would legalize marijuana."

Comments

Re:Prop 19

[OzPeter]

btw, it annoys me to no end when some foreigner complains on Slashdot about how some comment is USA-centric. Sure, the internet is international, but when I go to a British website I don't complain about how it's UK-centric. I love that so many foreigners post on Slashdot; I've learned quite a bit from them, especially when the story is about their home country; but don't get annoyed when comments on a political story use the pronoun 'we' to refer to 'the American people.'

As a foreigner who posts here and has had stories accepted here I feel somewhat eligible to respond to this comment. I will do so with an example of what I have experienced.

I saw an article in a newspaper in my home country (of which English is the native language), made a submission with a direct quote from the linked text. The submission was accepted and published on /. but the kicker was that spelling in the direct quote was converted to US English.

It is this sort of lack of respect that brings forth the things you are complaining about.

You may say that ./ is a US centric website. Yes I agree it was a US based creation but I suspect that a significant amount of readership is non-US based and a huge number of stories are non US related, so I feel that complaining about foreigners saying what they do is a bit off base.