Sarah Lacy, guestblogging at TechCrunch for Michael Arrington, described a new tool created by the startup YouNoodle, and inadvertently made an excellent point about the inability of governments to act as investors.

YouNoodle is a company that “develops innovative ways to bring together the information, people and technology that help startups succeed,” which includes the Startup Predictor. The Predictor uses a complex algorithim based on years of research to give a rough estimate of the future success of a given startup. As Lacy pointed out, the company recently added YouNoodle Scores, which try to go beyond the apparent buzz a company may have, and use less apparent factors to determine which companies are actually succeeding and which are just great viral marketers.

Unlike a vanity Twitter app that ranks the value of Tweets based on surface details like how many people follow you, there’s some serious methodology here, thanks to a partnership with Sean Gourley. Gourley is a Rhodes Scholar who’s studied how collective intelligence works, specifically how different cultural patterns, news reports and buzz lead up to break outs of terror attacks and wars. He found that you could predict the nature, size and timing of outbreaks by looking at all these factors. YouNoodle hired him to apply the same thing in the startup world: Analyzing traditional media, blog posts, Twitters, Alexa traffic patterns and other metrics over time to predict when and how a startup would, well, break out.

Conceptually, figuring out what all these patterns and metrics really mean will be even more important as we trudge deeper into this muck of a recession. Web 2.0 has become way too reliant on surface metrics with all of us thinking page views, unique visitors, Facebook friends and Twitter followers implies value in an age when we all know how to goose these metrics. If the algorithm works right, my guess is you see sites with fewer gaudy statistics actually scoring higher in meaningful buzz.

The tool sounds fascinating, but like all web endeavors, it has to find a way to make money, which Lacy saw as a stumbling block.

It’s possible the new scoring engine may help YouNoodle inch towards a business model—the biggest area where I’ve had my doubts about the company. I don’t think VCs are a great market to buy any premium YouNoodle analytics, because there’s going to be natural skepticism that an algorithm can be any kind of substitute for their experience and judgment. But governments charged with investing in startups are a natural fit. After all, they are trying to act like VCs without the training or experience. Even if YouNoodle’s algorithm is right 30% of the time, it’d be a huge upgrade over funding companies in the dark. One of the company’s launch partners is the UK’s Department of Trade and Investment, which is currently charged with disbursing some one billion pounds into the London scene.

Did you catch that? Lacy sees the most likely market as government agencies who are jumping into “venture capital” without a shred of meaningful knowledge or experience. I’m sure the company is happy about the implication: YouNoodle Scores, a tool only bureaucrats would buy.

Of course, we should ask ourselves, what on earth is government creating venture capital funds in the first place? They don’t know the market, don’t know the trends, don’t know the variables that matter. Moreover, no one in a government-backed venture capital fund has to stake his livelihood on the investment decisions they make. So, even if the government is able to find the most capable consultants or advisors from the private sector, they will have different incentives than a private investor would (think of pension fund managers; it’s not their money their gambling with).

YouNoodle Scores sounds like a great tool. Let’s hope that it finds a way to make money without being a crutch for misguided governmental schemes.