What is the Web Bot Project?

The Web Bot Project was an application created by Clif High and George Ure that crawled various Internet sites according to specific preset keywords. The initial purpose of the application was to search for information that would indicate stock market trends.

The original creators of the Web Bot Project claimed that the application was able to successfully predict events such as hurricane Katrina months in advance. A team from Microsoft Research and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has also collaborated to create a similar application that would mine data from the Internet. That application has shown a prediction accuracy of 70 to 90 percent when applied in various tests.