Google Can Predict the Flu

An anonymous reader mentions Google Flu Trends, a newly unveiled initiative of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm. The claim is that this Web service, which aggregates search data to track outbreaks of influenza, can spot disease trends up to 2 weeks before Centers for Disease Control data can. The NYTimes writeup begins: "What if Google knew before anyone else that a fast-spreading flu outbreak was putting you at heightened risk of getting sick? And what if it could alert you, your doctor and your local public health officials before the muscle aches and chills kicked in? That, in essence, is the promise of Google Flu Trends, a new Web tool ... unveiled on Tuesday, right at the start of flu season in the US. Google Flu Trends is based on the simple idea that people who are feeling sick will tend to turn to the Web for information, typing things like 'flu symptoms; or 'muscle aches' into Google. The service tracks such queries and charts their ebb and flow, broken down by regions and states."

Comments

Re:Damn

[Facegarden]

It doesn't predict anything reliably. Too many variables.

Simply put: If you're looking for help online for flu symptoms, that doesn't correlate with an 'outbreak' of flu.

And what defines outbreak anyway?

Well, the way flu works, if you have it, you're likely to give it to someone else. You may google about it when you don't actually have it, but how often does that happen? The number of false positive searches would probably be somewhat low, and either way they would be constant. Google serves millions of search results a day, if not more. Almost everything "random" would, over time, look constant. When non-random things happen, like people from a certain region (remember, google knows your IP) getting the flu, even a 1% increase in flu related searches is extremely significant, if it otherwise doesn't vary that much.

YOU googling for flu symptoms doesn't necessarily indicate if you have the flu, but a large increase in the number of people googling it probably does. Especially if you can compare your data to the CDC data, to check your theories.

-Taylor