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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure it would be legal, but I would put a significant amount of devs onto predicting stocks. A blog goes more silent or people start Googling for "what is fraud, exactly?" from IPs known to contain lots of IBM workers (that would be more on the illegal end for sure).

Obviously a lawyer would need to review every input, but they have access to machine learning and data so much so that they could rock the exchanges.

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I recall Eric Schmidt saying they thought about this, but the lawyers told them it would be illegal so they didn't explore it further.

At what point does it become illegal though. Surely if Goldman can trade then there must be some aggregation that they are allowed to trade at. "Debt consolidation" search trends for example. If it spikes in a certain country then they would be able to make decisions on that.

Seems like so much untapped potential.

I recall a friend of mine who left Google, fully vested, for the early days of Facebook, who said they thought about this but decided insider trading would be evil, so they didn't do it. I'd be really surprised if they had to talk to lawyers to figure that out.

The interesting thing is that Google itself has an internal hedge fund (or something close) that trades its cash hoard. I'm not sure if they do it algorithmically or whether they just buy-and-hold various indices, but my suspicion is that (given their engineering background) they probably do some algorithmic trading.

Google is already predicting flu trends. I imagine that could be modified for stocks or just about anything else.

http://www.google.org/flutrends/

Using search data to predict public health issues is legal and good PR. Using search data to trade on insider information is illegal and bad PR. That's why we do the flu thing and not the stock thing :)

Question. How is it illegal if its publicly scrapable information?

It wouldn't be public information they would be using their own server logs which of course no one else has access to.

The information was public already before google scraped it.

why is using search data to trade illegal?

Why is using material non-public information to trade illegal? I don't know, I didn't write the law.

search results (and open stuff that google crawls from sites) is PUBLIC... Using INSIDE information (e.g. if you work at a company, therefore having access to undisclosed info) is one thing, but using what's freely on the net?

That's what ALL investors do anyway (and it's obviously legal)

But everything in google's search-index is public?

... but not the interactions of google's users with google's services.

That's right but how can it be illegal for them to mine their own data?

I see it becoming illegal the moment they start looking at my data (e.g. the contents of a private Google doc). But the index of their public search engine consists of public data to begin with.

Likewise by entering a phrase into their search box I'm telling them "find this for me". Why should it be illegal for google to mine this data just like Walmart mines the customer requests for barbie dolls?

There's obviously a fine line as google juggles with private (e.g. google docs) and public data. But the question as I understood it was about the public portion of their data.

This sort of thing is already being done.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3003

It would be tempting to do the same as a payment processor of some kind, too.

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