Webbot Predictions

Correct me if I am wrong, but doesnt all the webbot do is scan the internet for words and then form some kind of prediction from them. So it is not surprising that they would predict some kind of economic catastrophe. Look at all the news out there. All there is is talk of economic disaster. The webbot isnt some magic ball. It just pretty much gets its info from internet articles and forms a conclusion from them, right? Same with 2012. People talk about the end of the world. That is what 2012 is associated with. Type in 2012 in google and it will tell you the same thing. If this is the case, then the actual rescue plan or what we do from this point forward can change what the webbot has predicted.

There’s been some sort of hype lately regarding the Web Bots and I’m really surprised there’s almost no information about it available. The Web Bot project was developed in the late 1990s mainly to predict the stock market ups and downs (Web bot and stock markets). How do they do it? It’s really simple in fact and it’s a very nice implementation of what search engines do. Web bots simply crawl the web the same way Google crawls it at regular intervals to catch new and existing web sites and detect relevant keywords. Web Bots do it just a little differently: While search engines are just “indexing” the Web and creating a Web directory, Web bots are looking for trends with the keyword relations they find. It search for keywords “standing out” in a web document but also take in consideration the content preceding and following the keyword. This data is then analyzed by a linguistic tool to determine the meaning if there’s any

SOURCE
So although I am concerned with the way the economy is going, I am not going to be scared because some computer program predicted that there was going to be some huge catastrophe. After all, if they are just getting their info from articles written on the web, no wonder they are predicting this. Maybe this major catastrophe didnt happen because the rescue plan was passed. I know what you are going to say. The rescue plan didnt do anything. Well, first off it hasnt even been implemented yet. It could take months before we see if it truly worked. The other way to look at this is to picture what today would be like if we didnt do anything. Would it be better or worse. I cant tell you for sure, but maybe the webbot was prediction was based on no rescue plan.

[edit on 8-10-2008 by tide88]

Wow, you really missed the boat on that one. The technical description of the webbot project, how it functions and it's capabilities you've quoted is completely wrong. Also, the project has made quite a few accurate predictions on subjects other than the economy, quite a few of those predictions have been compelling not only in the accuracy of time frame but also the minute details given.

I believe the economic prediction was made over a year ago and has refined itself over time as more sweeps were made.

People are confusing what the webbot project has predicted also, there have been no "doom and gloom", WW3 any day now or sudden nuclear attack predictions made by the project. Quite a few people have failed completely to do any research or even minimally inform themselves and are mixing up various predictions made by "psychics" who jumped on the dates given but added unsupported and sometimes ridiculous predictions for those same dates.

References for accurate information:
A description of the webbot process direct from the project team

The only website official webbot public releases are posted on

Originally posted by nfotech


I believe the economic prediction was made over a year ago and has refined itself over time as more sweeps were made.



References for accurate information:
A description of the webbot process direct from the project team

The only website official webbot public releases are posted on

Yes this is true, OP got it wrong by thinking web-bot predicted this a few weeks ago because ever1 is talking about it.l

But in fact web-bot predicted this many months ago. Quite remarkable

Originally posted by tide88

You're exactcly right. The stock market operates on fear and rumors in a big way. When a big rumor floats around saying that stock is going down, people tend to believe it and will sell, causing the stock to drop even more.

They created a web-bot that would search the web for the current fear was about, the current rumors, and text about "selling" or "buying" (and what was after and before those terms, of course), along with many other factors...

It's in no way some magic computer program. It's just a search engine that has a very specific purpose.

Anyway, some of these people don't seem to understand that when it makes a prediction, it does so against a pool of data that it has analyzed. In time, and with more data collected, the entire pool changes and it may results in another, different prediction.

From that, you have people saying, "Oh, well it did predict this last month!"

It didn't predict *anything* because it was programmed to analyze data and return an outcome based on what people were talking about. It didn't predict anything because all it did was return what "the internet" was talking about at the time.

It only, and simply, returned what internet users "predicted" en mass.

If you think this is somehow magic, I also have some magic beans to sell you.

reply to post by nfotech

You are using Urban survival as your source. I would love to see all the so called predictions the webbot has made and has come wrong. And many people here predicted the economy would collapse two years ago. Even some politicians warned of this. Hell greenspan warned of it in 2003. I would like to see some article posted a year ago that gives the date of Oct 7. The first I heard of Oct. 7 was a week ago. Some prediction. And yes the website I posted gives a simple description of how it works. However even your website claims

He described how technology worked. A system of spiders, agents, and wanderers travel the Internet, much like a search engine robot, and look for particular kinds of words. It targets discussion groups, translation sites, and places were regular people post a lot of text.

Urban Suvivaval So yes even though I gave the simplist version the program is still based on scanning for words. Look what some said about the sept 11 attack prediciton:

Based upon an analysis of 3 months of GCP data, I conclude that a statistical anomaly occurred that was associated with the date, time and general location of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. There is also evidence that the anomaly began to appear a few hours before the widely visible events unfolded.

There were also a unprecidented amount of terrorist exorcises going on that day. Maybe it was just talking about that.