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September 30, 2005
Google Prediction Markets
Patri Friedman, a google engineer who works on evaluating search quality, posted about the surprising accuracy of Google's Internal Prediction Market.
I've written a post about the previous prediction markets workshop at SuperNova2005, which gave some background on the topic from pioneers and leaders in the field.
I am excited to see Google developing and using prediction markets internally. It just points to what, in my mind, is one of the best things about Google: they really think about collective intelligence (CI), in the sense envisioned by Doug Englebart -- how to ensure that the many within an organization or community can process information and make decisions that benefit from scale, rather than get hurt by it.
From Bill Gates' book "Business at the Speed of Thought", it seeemed that Microsoft truly embraced the concept, but now Google is likely to have taken it to a new level.
I wish that Google would take its internal collective intelligence tool suite (wikis, bug tracking, resistance to powerpoint, and now prediction markets) and make them open source or otherwise available so that other organizations could adopt them. Of course that requires cultural inclinations that are not common outside Google.
In any case, when people talk about Google's greatest competitive assets, I think their "CI culture" should rank high up there, although I don't recall seeing it discussed by any of the analysts.
Posted by barney at September 30, 2005 11:26 PM
This entry was posted in the following categories: Collective Intelligence , Ecommerce
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Comments
A recent book (paperback edition just out)"The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki, treats collective inelligence in some depth. Not technical. He writes for The New Yorker. I haven't yet read it, but heard him give a talk on it a few weeks ago at a two-day workshop on complex adaptive systems put on in Santa Clara by The Santa Fe Institute.
Posted by: ronaldlevine ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.barneypell.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at October 3, 2005 8:46 PM
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