google flu tracker

I am continually impressed by Google’s innovation. Their non-profit arm has recently released a flu tracker which can estimate the spread of the flu using certain search terms.

Google Flu Trends avoids privacy pitfalls by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be traced to individual searchers. To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others.

Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped it onto the C.D.C.’s reports of influenzalike illness. Google found a strong correlation between its data and the reports from the agency, which advised it on the development of the new service.

read entire New York Times article..

The flu tracker is worth checking out. You can quickly get a visual story of when the flu season is coming up and how it varies by region. Since the project was only done for the States, I used Washington for comparison. A very powerful tool indeed.

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