Google Flu Trends is watching out for your well-being
Posted by Manuela Barreto @ November 12th, 2008 in Search Engine Marketing
Does your colleague keep coughing and driving you up the wall? Well, turns out Google can explain the nature of the problem.
Due to massive influenza outbreaks and continuous flu-related search queries, Google saw it useful to launch ‘Google Flu Trends’, to provide its users day-to-day flu-related activities. It seems like people, the minute they feel like they’re about to ‘come down with something’ start seeking for the reasons to their symptoms before they even reach the doctor’s office.
This is how Google spots the trend and plots it in explicit graphs such as the one below.
Google along with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention will track cases of the flu throught the US, in this particular scenario. Together the two entities can come up with effective enough results to provide humankind with an early alert system for outbreaks and diseases.
This is yet the first experiment Google has executed, but one can easily imagine the kind of search data they can combine and provide healthcare professionals with. More importantly, the combination of this information and the fact that you can easily log on to your computer to find out which disease is coming your way, is truly innovative.
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