Google's whitepaper on future search trends:
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2...ch-trends.html
Not surprising considering Google has historically spent millions yearly attracting mathematicians and modellers
We were therefore interested in the following questions:
* How many search queries have trends that are predictable?
* Are some categories more predictable than others? How is the distribution of predictable trends between the various categories?
* How predictable are the trends of aggregated search queries for different categories? Which categories are more predictable and which are less so?
To learn about the predictability of search trends, and so as to overcome our basic limitation of not knowing what the future will entail, we characterize the predictability of a Trends series based on its historical performance. In other words, we estimate the a posteriori predictability of a sequence determined by the error of forecasted trends vs the actual performance.