ClickZ’s Chris Sherman reports on Yahoo’s Tech Buzz Game that gives anyone 10,000 USD pretend money to invest online in any number of stocks.

I signed up and started making investments (ie: 100 dollars in the Katrina Fund - I’m thinking the real estate market will pick up on the Gulf Coast and a lot of development will be going on there that will raise my investment).

According to Chris Sherman ..

The Tech Buzz Game is an intriguing offering that lets you and others predict the technologies people will search the Web for in the future. How? By buying or selling fantasy stocks that reflect a mix of companies, products, and technologies in innovative areas.

…The game is fun if you’re interested in the whole idea of buying and selling based on your own bets on future trends. What makes it even more interesting is each stock has a buzz score, representing its percentage of search buzz compared to other stocks in the same market.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s search buzz? Essentially, it’s a number of words or phrases associated with a particular stock. Buzzwords are chosen by starting with an initial seed set of related search phrases. This initial set is expanded by using Yahoo! Search Web Services to discover related searches.

You can see the buzz words for a stock by clicking the "view buzz words" link on the stock’s information page. A bonus on this page: Yahoo! News headlines related to each stock.

At certain intervals, all shares in all stocks cash out according to buzz scores. This means prices in the game are grounded in something real: search frequency on Yahoo! Ultimately, you’re not only making bets based on your own knowledge and insight, you’re also trying to predict search trends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s pretty intriquing as it opens up all kinds of possibilities both in social engineering and keyword research.

In fact, I looked at the Search Buzz for Technorati

technorati

technorati tags technorati tags technorati tags

technorati tagging technorati tagging technorati tagging

technorati solaris technorati solaris technorati solaris

The last, technorati solaris, I would never have thought of as a search term - i guess people are searching for technorati using that phase.

One of the goals of this online game is To investigate opportunities around predicting trends in search engine behavior, and how they relate to events in the real world.   That means Yahoo is researching how Search engines are reflecting financial, social, economic and political change.

The reasoning behind all of this is published in a scientific paper you can download here.