Tech Flu
Sukumar Ranganathan -
Friday, December 12, 2008 8:19 PM
This doesn't surprise me given the state of the healthcare system in that country, but it looks like when most Americans get the flu, they go to Google to find out what to do.
At least that's what this article today in Slate seems to suggest.
Turns out that with a lot of people checking what to do on Google, the search engine, Google.org, the not-for-profit arm of the eponymous company launched something called Flu Trends, which essentially aggregates search data on flu, arranges it by state, and claims to "estimate flu activity ... up to two weeks faster than traditional systems".
The article goes on to say that encouraged by their findings, the Google team actually wrote to science journal Nature on the methodology and accuracy of "detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data."
Clearly, this is a lot more interesting than Google Zeitgeist 2008