Google catches flu

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 12 Nov 2008 at 11:25

Google has launched a new tool aimed at tracking flu outbreaks as they happen.

Flu Trends has been developed by Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the search giant, and uses flu-related terms people enter into the search engine to locate flu hotspots.

"There's a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms," says Google in a statement. "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."

While organisations such as the US's Center for Disease Control and Prevention already compile data on flu patterns, Google claims this information can be up to two weeks old by the time it's pushed into the public domain.

Flu Trends can offer a day-by-day account of flu activity, and offer data that can be broken down by region, allowing it to act as an early warning system for hospitals and doctors.

Google claims that in order to protect the privacy of its users it's keeping the exact search terms it uses to compile the data secret.

"We rely on millions of search queries issued to Google over time, and the patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users," the company claims.

Google Flu Trends only covers the US, but Google is hoping to roll out a similar system capable of tracking influenza and other diseases worldwide.

Check out Google Flu Trends here.