We’ve put an interesting press release out today - in which we use the site search behavior on DeepDiscountDVD to predict the outcome of the Oscars. This is a bit of fun and came from the wisdom of crowds theory. This suggests that groups are often smarter than any of the people in them. To me this is counter-intuitive - but I’m sure if I asked the rest of the people in the office then, as a group, we wouldn’t think so :-). There is a book on this subject.

The idea was to compare the site search traffic on DeepDiscountDVD for Oscar nominees in a few of the main categories. We weren’t sure that this would work - most of the recent movies have not been released on DVD. However we found that doesn’t stop people searching for them and DeepDiscountDVD does sell posters of Brokeback mountain.

We found that rather than looking at the total number of searches for each nominee, it was necessary to look at how the search traffic had increased. This stopped George Clooney from automatically winning the best director - there are more searches for him than any of the other directors. This approach had it’s own flaws - but I don’t think it really matters. I’m looking forward to seeing how our predictions pan out.

This entry was posted by Shaun Ryan on Monday, February 27th, 2006 at 3:49 pm PST and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.