
Meet Google’s Secret Time Machine Investment - raju
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100503/meet-googles-secret-time-machine-investment/
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huherto
Napkin summary: It searches the web for information on future events. Not
magical but still interesting.

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eob
I wonder if there will come a day when financial investors can not do without
this type of tool.

Ever since Google became big, I've always assumed that they must have the
ability to beat the market ever day because they have access to queries, click
trails, and web publications.

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ct4ul4u
I'm sure that type of signal is valuable, but it takes a lot more than that to
make money. It needs to be combined with a lot of other signal in order to
come up with an estimate of alpha (idiosyncratic return). Then you need to
understand how to remove market risk from your bets (what risk factors are you
exposed to and what opposing positions do you need to take to minimize them).
Some of the return will disappear in market impact (movement of the stock due
to getting into and out of the position). The people who do this are expensive
and apprenticeship is the only road to competence (the distance between theory
and practice is vast). Finally, it's a distraction from Google's core
business.

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Groxx
That's a really interesting use for searches. Seems decently well designed,
too.

Given that you can search by day, week, month, etc within Google, and even see
charts of hits, it'd make sense that they want to allow searches for future
dates too. I'd imagine that, if they developed their own, they might be
fighting a patent case really quickly. It's probably to cover their asses and
get a jump-start at the same time.

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wisty
Google once did an April fools, in Australia.
<http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/index.html>

Perhaps they'll be able to implement it for real?

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mixer21
So lastly posted on HN picture of time traveler was a guy from google...? :)

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Groxx
No, that's going to be posted next week.

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igorzaq
Google has so much money that I can believe in anything...

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clistctrl
I wonder if this is going to be a paid subscription service, or open? I can't
decide which route would best relate to "Do No Evil"

