One of the many interesting tools offered by the search giant is Google Trends. It allows one to compare the number of searches on various queries. I thought it might be a useful tool for predicting the winner of American Idol tonight. The theory is that web searches reflect interest, which should translate into votes.
Unfortunately, it only has data through May 24th (Monday) at this point, so it doesn’t tell us what the interest was last night, when voting was happening.
It does reveal an interesting trend, however:
Searches for [crystal bowersox] mostly outpaced searches for [lee dewyze] until last week’s performance show, where Lee jumped way ahead. This is even more clear on the data for the last thirty days:
Lee certainly has been coming on strong the last few weeks, and he was great last week. Crystal was much better than he was last night, however.
It should be interesting to look back once we’ve got the data and the results to see how they correlate.