An XKCD cartoon today described Googling the future using search terms such as “in <year>” and “by <year>”:
So I tried it:
Hmm – results from the future?
So I had a play in Google News… could this be a good way of searching forecasts?
By searching the past, we can search for old forecasts of the future…
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to search results from 2006, 2001, and 1991 for the 5, 10 and 20 years forecasts respectively for this year… let me know in the comments if anything interesting turns up;-)
See also: Google Impact…? The “Google Suggest” Factor
PS ANd this: Quantifying the Advantage of Looking Forward, which looks for different countries at the ratio of searches for year+1 and year-1 over the course of a year, then plots the resulting quotient against GDP. The results appear to suggest that there is a correlation between GDP and the forward looking tendency of the population. (But is this right? Do the search volumes get normalised (on Google Trends) by the volume of the first term at the start of the trend period? If the user numbers are growing over the course of the year, might we be skewing the future looking component because of loaded terms at the end of the year?)
OUseful.Info, the blog... 
Like it – could this be done as a custom search I wonder…..
I don’t think you can do custom search over news? But you could build your own around news API (does news search have an API?!)
So the experiment is to measure reliability of past predictions. Should be revealing.
Extremely interesting exercise. In an unscientific study of 2005 predictions for 2010:
“IBM earnings per share could surge to $11 per share in 2010” – achieved
“China aims to put man on moon by 2010” – think I might have heard about that.
“Ford promises hybrid engines in half its lineup by 2010” – nope!
We need a carefully selected sample though, this is too random.
apparently It’s all in wikipedia already, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020 .. and of course there is (will always be?) old moores almanac ,, http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Old-Moores-Almanack-2013-Francis-Moore/9780572039165