Google may help. You could type “Insights for Search” or you could, on the top line, click “more.” Then you could scroll to the bottom: “even more.” Then you could scroll to “Trends.” You could type the subject of your choice and see what happens.
If you find that, in a certain region, the number of searches for “flu symptoms” is going up dramatically, you can deduce that within a week or ten days there will be a flu epidemic.
Searching constitutes evidence for all kinds of economic and political phenomena – from jobs to real estate to consumer goods to political parties and personalities. Searches may indicate future events.
They have been found to be more accurate than polling and surveys. It is axiomatic that people, alas, do not always tell the truth to human questioners.
You could click your name in “Insights for Search” and might, if there is enough “search volume,” discover how much interest there has been in you since 2004. Psychologists will have to decide to what extent, if any, this has a bearing on your future.
If you search for God under Google Trends you will find that, according to the Vatican, Bin Laden will have to answer to Him.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
What did we do in a pre literate world? A world where the phrase, “Let me look this up” has no meaning and all history is passed on orally.
You are right: What was good enough for Homer should be good enough for us.
What does one look up to find the correct date of the end of the world?
I looked it up: there is a huge peak in the number of searches in the middle of 2011 – this indicates clearly that it is coming. Be prepared!
Maybe those searches were generated because of the US pastor’s prediction that the world would end in June (or was it May?), now postponed to later in October. When the Mayan calendar runs out next year, I predict that we will find out what happens after the world ends. I predict that it will be much the same as what was happening before the world ended.
Google adjusts search results to accommodate the interests of the searcher. That means that your search results for a particular query may be different from mine. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/mind-control-and-internet/ (It means as well, if I understand the point properly, that if I repeatedly search for my own name, my results will improve. My reputation is a self-fulfilling prophecy, at least in my own mind.)