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. We must first take a trip down memory lane.

In 2007, America whittled down the Idol playing field to teenage phenom Jordan Sparks, offbeat beat-boxer Blake Lewis and R&B songstress Melinda Doolittle.

• Unlike the previous year, search volume for the top three during Season 6 remained close from March through May.

• Doolittle was ousted from the show on May 16, but her passionate fan base took their enthusiasm to Google. Note the relative surge in search volume following her departure.

Given Doolittle’s immense popularity, we wanted to see how her absence from the show would affect votes for Sparks and Lewis. A closer look revealed that Sparks received more related searches than Lewis – a key insight into why Sparks was eventually able to edge out Lewis in the finale.

Finally, last year, America was torn between two Davids – Cook and Archuleta – who traded search volume jabs as Idol’s seventh season drew to a close. Third place contestant Syesha Mercado was a laggard throughout March and April, statistically flat-lining when compared to the Davids.