Predicting the News of Tomorrow Using Patterns in Web Search Queries

Abstract

The novel task we aim at in this work is to predict top terms that will prominently appear in the future news. This is a difficult task that nobody attempted before, as far as we know. We present a novel methodology for using patterns of user queries to predict future events. Query history is obtained from Web resources such as Google trends. In order to predict whether a term will appear in tomorrow's news, we examine if the terms in today's queries indicated this term in the past. We provide empirical support for the effectiveness of our method by showing its prediction power on news archives.