The votes are tallied and America has spoken – Kris Allen is the next American Idol. In our post on Mashable yesterday, we set out to see if Google Trends could predict the winner. Looking at search data – volume, geographic and related search trends – in the months leading up to past season finales, clear patterns began to emerge.

The eventual winner typically had a larger volume of search queries than the runners up in the weeks before the finale. Beyond that, geographic trends revealed “swing states” that would likely lean towards one of the final two when that state’s popular and eventual third place choice was voted off. We also looked at related searches to predict where an ousted contestant’s votes might end up.

This year, the data (and most pundits) favored Adam Lambert as the clear winner, but in the end America swung the other way. Even American Idol’s king of predictions, Simon Cowell, must have been shocked by last night’s result, as he recently told Oprah that Adam would win – and that furthermore, Kris Allen doesn’t have the vocal chops to win Idol.

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Everyone thinks they know who is going to win American Idol this season: your mom, your 12-year-old sister, about half of the people you follow on Twitter and even Simon Cowell all seem to agree that California rocker Adam Lambert will be this year’s champ.

Well, now you can add digital marketers to the growing list of Adam-believers – but for a different reason.

What if you could predict the winner of American Idol before the final votes were tallied – without having followed the season’s contest or listened to the pundits – by analyzing online search trends alone? Are search trends really a proxy for what will happen in the future?

By looking at Google search trends – volume, demographic and geographic – from March through May for the top three finalists of prior seasons, we were able to spot patterns in the data that seem to predict the eventual winner of American Idol Season 8.

So, how do this year’s search trends enable us to predict Adam as tonight’s winner? Well, it’s certainly not as simple as looking at who has the most search volume.

Read our complete article in Mashable to learn how we did it.