Google Flu Trends

A couple of weeks ago I got my annual Flu Shot. I know that some people do not bother with a flu shot because let’s face it no one wants to get a shot and every year people still get the flu even when they get a shot.

Well let me tell you, the flu shot is worth getting, most of the time out of the multiple strains of the flu out there the scientists get the flu shot just right to stop many of us from getting sick later in the fall and Winter

With flu season on the way, Google unveiled a new tool Tuesday dubbed Google Flu Trends, through the company’s philanthropic wing, Google.org. The new Web tool takes data from search queries and crunches the information to paint a real-time picture of the level of influenza infection in a given area of the United States.

Google is banking that Internet users will use the company’s search engine as a first source of information when they begin feeling sick by querying such terms as “flu symptoms.”

By joining the data from those search terms with its users’ locations – Google logs the geographic location of its users for each query on its search engine Google believes it can predict a flu outbreak up to two weeks before traditional tracking systems.

Google engineers say they discovered that certain search queries are most common during flu season.

When the company compared its data with that of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it found that there was a close correlation between the frequency of specific search terms and the number of people who are suffering from flu-like symptoms in a given week.

This idea is not new with search. I just read a book a couple of weeks ago called Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters where a researcher was able to see that among many other things, depression does not peak at Christmas time instead the peak for depression actually happens in November. The search engine researcher was able to deduce this from search trends through out the year and seeing the peak for depression trends was actually at this time of year instead but people just get together and talk about it more at Christmas and New Years.

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