From The Chronicle of Higher Education
Professors Find Ways to Keep Heads Above 'Exaflood' of Data
By Josh Fischman
"We may already be in the red in terms of our ability to store information," said Christopher L. Greer last week to an interested, and vaguely intimidated, audience of scientists and other academics. Gene sequences, distant pulsar signals, YouTube videos, e-mail -- it's all too much to keep track of....
And Google, a major source of information overload, can also help manage it, according to Google's chief economist. Hal Varian, who is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley [School of Information] as well as a researcher for the search-engine giant, showed off an analytic tool called Google Insights for Search. Using the number and distribution of individual Google searches for information on Toyota automobiles, he said, he was able to predict sales volume with some accuracy days before industry figures were released.