Friday, September 23, 2005

Google Putting Crowd Wisdom to Work

Slashdot: "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.'"

Official Google Blog: Putting crowd wisdom to work: "Building on the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and the Iowa Electronic Markets, a few Googlers (Doug Banks, Patri Friedman, Ilya Kirnos, Piaw Na and me, with some help from Hal Varian), set up a predictive market system inside the company.

The markets were designed to forecast product launch dates, new office openings, and many other things of strategic importance to Google. So far, more than a thousand Googlers have bid on 146 events in 43 different subject areas (no payment is required to play)."

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