March 28, 2024
Annapolis, US 47 F

A Useful Flu Tool From Google

Google Flu Trends

Leave it to Google to come up with this tool.  But you can track the flu in near real time based on Google search activity. Try it out here.

Here is what Google has to say about this new tool:

Each week, millions of users around the world search for health information online. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Insights for Search. But can search query trends provide the basis for an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. Our results have been published in the journal Nature.

Previous Article

Regional Recap, October 23, 2009

Next Article

Miss The Mayoral Forum Last Night?

You might be interested in …