Google Launches ‘Flu Trends’ to Track Outbreaks for the Feds

Will track use of certain influenza-related keywords and phrases and notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time.

The power of Google and its search engine is rapidly permeating all aspects of our increasingly online world, and recent news that search queries will be used to monitor and track the outbreak of influenza proves this development.

For today, Google has launched a new tool called "Flu Trends" that will track search queries comprised of specific keywords and phrases to identify where influenza outbreaks are occurring, and notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time.

The Google Blog reads: "Our team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season each year. We compared these aggregated queries against data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we found that there’s a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week. As a result, if we tally each day’s flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness. Based on this discovery, we have launched Google Flu Trends, where you can find up-to-date influenza-related activity estimates for each of the 50 states in the US."

The CDC has already tested out Flu Trends, and is no doubt already putting it to good use as the Flu season heats up and people begin contracting the illness..

Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at the CDC, noted: "One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data. The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used… as early warning signal for flu activity."

Google says that individual user data would be kept confidential, but it makes you wonder what else it would use user data for and under what circumstances.

"Google Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week," the Google Blog continues. "The patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users."

Using Google search queries to find user patterns is certainly something that researchers from any given field would kill to have to access to. I just hope that we don’t allow law enforcement authorities to have similar access and be allowed to track patterns of illegal behavior.

Moreover, for the really paranoid, or even just the bored, you can watch as influenza stalks its prey across the country. It could maybe, just maybe, also make for one heck of a drinking game.

GOOGLE TRENDS

jared@zeropaid.com

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