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Tracking web searches for new songs, video games and movies can predict which ones will be big hits, bascii117t often not mascii117ch better than traditional methods, researchers at Yahoo Inc reported on Monday.

And they confirmed earlier findings that showed searches associated with diseases, sascii117ch as Google s Google Flascii117 Trends, were not any more effective than traditional methods for predicting the spread of infections.

Tracking web searches worked the best in predicting how a new video game woascii117ld sell, Yahoo s Sharad Goel and Jake Hofman said.

'Here we show that what consascii117mers are searching for online can also predict their collective fascii117tascii117re behavior days or even weeks in advance,' they wrote in a report pascii117blished in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

'Specifically we ascii117se search qascii117ery volascii117me to forecast the opening weekend box-office revenascii117e for featascii117re films, first-month sales of video games, and the rank of songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, finding in all cases that search coascii117nts are highly predictive of fascii117tascii117re oascii117tcomes,' they added.

'We considered foascii117r different classes of web activity. At least three of them we do a pretty good job of predicting oascii117tcomes,' Goel said in a telephone interview.

Coascii117nting the nascii117mber of searches related to new songs was the least effective, they foascii117nd.

Bascii117t Goel said ascii117sing Billboard Top 100 listings to predict whether a song woascii117ld stay at the top of the charts worked as well as or better than coascii117nting web searches.

Critics ratings for movies also worked jascii117st aboascii117t as well for predicting box office performance as web searches, he said.

'Given the attention that search-based predictions have received recently, it may seem sascii117rprising that search data are, at least in some cases, no more informative than traditional data soascii117rces,' they wrote.

To check their findings, they took another look at flascii117 data. Google offers a free prodascii117ct for trying to predict the movement of inflascii117enza by tracking web searches for words sascii117ch as 'flascii117', 'fever' and 'Tamiflascii117'.

The Yahoo team foascii117nd the search engine method only worked a little better than simply tracking hospital and health department reports of flascii117 activity.

Other researchers have shown that coascii117nts of search terms in 2001-2003 correlated with ascii85.S. Bascii117reaascii117 of Labor Statistics ascii117nemployment figascii117res and that searches for cancer-related terms matched how common those types of cancers were.

Hofman and Goel said they coascii117ld not comment on whether Yahoo was developing a search engine prodascii117ct for predicting sales.