Google - becomes Strange

[! search-engines-web]

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/...m-to-work.html

Sometimes too much technology can have Stra-a-ange effects

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).

We designed the market so that the price of an event should, in theory, reflect a consensus probability that the event will occur. To determine accuracy of the market, we looked at the connection between prices of events and the frequency with which they actually occurred. If prices are correct, events priced at 10 cents should occur about 10 percent of the time.

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

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http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/

[Fahhem]

Whaaaa... (what drawn out, I'm not crying)

Thats the weirdest thing I've seen regarding google's marketing and expansion policy. And I've seen some interesting things, like open flame-wars that stemmed from a misunderstanding of whether a guy meant google will or will not update google talk with more features.

That was a very funny string of comments...

Watch out for the predictions of "Google buys 666.com], "Google introduces new motto, 'Don't be too evil'", and "The o's in Google to grow horns in the generic shape of a demon's"

Before you search places for those, I made them totally up on spot, so wherever, if any, has the same speculations, I haven't seen it, conciously or subconciously.

[Anonymous]

I'm really confused - I didn't understand any of it. Could somebody please explain in simpler English?????

Thanks,

Oli