Predicting the future.

David Leonhart writes, in the New York Times, about how the internet can be used to predict future trends for humanity! And with the recent unveiling of Google Trends, even the layman can get into this business of predicting the future...

Some excerpts...

When people went to the home page of Google or Yahoo and entered a few words into a search engine, what they were really doing, he realized, was announcing their intentions.They typed in "Alaskan cruise" because they were thinking about taking one or "baby names" because they were planning on needing one.
...
YOU can see, for example, that the volume of Google searches would have done an excellent job predicting this year's "American Idol," with Taylor Hicks (the champion) being searched more often than Katharine McPhee (second place), who in turn was searched more often than Elliot Yamin (third place). Then you can compare Hillary Clinton and Al Gore and discover that she was more popular than he for almost all of the last two years, until he surged past her in April and stayed there.
...
Thanks to Google Trends, the mayor of Elmhurst, Ill., a Chicago suburb, has had to explain why his city devotes more of its Web searches to "sex" than any other in the United States (because it doesn't have strip clubs or pornography shops, he gamely told The Chicago Sun-Times).

Well, I wonder if the internet searches could also perhaps provide seeds for truly random number generators...

But I threw in the following comparison, and saw an interesting result...

McCain vs Gore

Interestingly, both have similar news coverage volumes, but Al Gore seems to lead in the search category, and with a wide margin at that ! John McCain came close only once, that too in early 2004...now, if Al Gore joins the presidential race for 2008, we can perhaps venture a guess as to who will win ? Assuming of course that both will be the frontrunners from their respective parties...