I raved the other day about the coming of search engines for (public) data, and I dreamed up about search engines for prediction market data. What I completely forgot to mention is that most of prediction exchanges don’t publish their archives on the Web. Most prediction exchanges (but HubDub) make it impossible for any search engine to spider and index their archives. We are still living in the pre-historic age, folks —for the good reason that most exchange executives don’t understand the Internet and don’t get how to market on the Web.
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I have to say that Intrade provides a very convenient API to store historic data. I coded within a couple of days a spider on Google App Engine that visits InTrade and stores the archival data.
A pre-alpha version is available at:
http://intrade-archive.appspot.com/
For any bug reports or requests for features, just email me.
Panos, that’s very useful, thanks!
Doesn’t really make up for lack of archives that Google can deal with.
Exactly. InTrade and BetFair’s prediction markets should be archived so that Google Data Search and Wolfram Search can dig them and serve them to us.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
I couldn’t agree more.
Even forgetting historical data, the prediction exchanges are hard to search for *current* prices.
I’d recommend prediction exchanges mark up their pages using SearchMonkey. That way prices can surface right on the search results page.