Google Provides Flu Season Surveillance
Source: Tom's Guide | Keywords: Google, Flu, Season | Themes: The Internet, Business
One of the worst things about the Autumn and Winter months is the fact that you’re more than likely to pick up a case of the sniffles between September and April than you are during the summer.
It seems that most of us at the first sign of an ache or pain or a bout of sneezing keys in some kind of flu related search to Google. The search company found that there was a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms and while it comes right out and says not everyone who searches flu is ill, there is a pattern that emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together.
The company then compared its query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and discovered that certain search queries tend to be popular right when flu season kicks in. By counting how often Google sees these search queries, it can tell us how much flu is circulating in our state. Neat.
Traditional flu surveillance systems (you know, doctors diagnosing sick people) take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.
Get your flu shots and wrap up warm, people. Flu season is upon us.
Check out Google’s official blog post about Google Flu Trends or Flu Trends itself to see how the flu season is shaping up this year.
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Why the hell would you google the flu? Don't people have enough experience with it by now to know what its all about?
gm0n3y. they could be searching for doctors in their area? that's one response, after that i leave you to use your imagination, i know it's hard but try.
This would be nice if i could opt in to get a notice if my area appeared to have an outbreak starting, make sure to get extra vitamin C. though i do wish i could throttle how much information google picks up from me. kinda how i can throttle the "Safety" of my search results.
I wouldn't type "flu" into google if I wanted to find a doctor. My guess, on further consideration, is people looking for flu shots. Of course those would be people that don't have the flu, but it could still be indicative of people around them becoming sick (or it could just be the scare tactics used by the media).
"Why the hell would you google the flu?" -gm0n3y
"My guess, on further consideration, is people looking for flu shots." -gm0n3y
Please help keep useless comments out of the tubes and do the considering first next time.
(Nothing against you, just trying to make a point)
I still find it odd that there are significant enough numbers of people googling "flu" to compose a dataset that is viable for statistical consideration.
Well the article says "flu related" so they could be searching for webmd or other websites with typical cold symptoms and google is picking that up. in other words google is looking for a lot of keywords, and my guess is they are contrasting it with your normal search history to rule out people who are hypochondriacs.
I think regardless of whether or not you would perform such a search, Google checked their data against the disease centre's data and found it was aligning.
It sounds interesting and potentially helpful at any rate.
Its true, data mining searches has a lot of potential for out of box ideas like this.