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Google Flu Trends
Google and the spread of the flu? Not something that normally go hand-and-hand, but surprisingly, Google can tell us quite a bit about the spread of the flu based on search data. Google even has a nice animated chart showing the rise and fall of Google searches on the flu with actual CDC
Google explains:
Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?
We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.
Predicting the spread of the flu with Google. It’s probably not too surprising that our search patterns tell us quite a bit about ourselves on a societal level, but to actually use it to predict the spread of disease takes that to a whole new level.
For more, you can visit Google Flu Trends where they even allow you to download the data.
— michael | November 20, 2008 08:08 AM | Something to think about
