Google Provides Flu Season Surveillance

[JMcEntegart]

One of the worst things about the Autumn and Winter months is the fact that you’re more than likely to pick up a case of the sniffles between September and April than you are during the summer.

Google Provides Flu Season Surveillance : Read more

 

[gm0n3y]

Why the hell would you google the flu? Don't people have enough experience with it by now to know what its all about?

 

[jrabbitb]

gm0n3y. they could be searching for doctors in their area? that's one response, after that i leave you to use your imagination, i know it's hard but try.

This would be nice if i could opt in to get a notice if my area appeared to have an outbreak starting, make sure to get extra vitamin C. though i do wish i could throttle how much information google picks up from me. kinda how i can throttle the "Safety" of my search results.

 

[gm0n3y]

I wouldn't type "flu" into google if I wanted to find a doctor. My guess, on further consideration, is people looking for flu shots. Of course those would be people that don't have the flu, but it could still be indicative of people around them becoming sick (or it could just be the scare tactics used by the media).

 

[jrabbitb]

"Why the hell would you google the flu?" -gm0n3y
"My guess, on further consideration, is people looking for flu shots." -gm0n3y

Please help keep useless comments out of the tubes and do the considering first next time.

(Nothing against you, just trying to make a point)

 

[gm0n3y]

I still find it odd that there are significant enough numbers of people googling "flu" to compose a dataset that is viable for statistical consideration.

 

[jrabbitb]

Well the article says "flu related" so they could be searching for webmd or other websites with typical cold symptoms and google is picking that up. in other words google is looking for a lot of keywords, and my guess is they are contrasting it with your normal search history to rule out people who are hypochondriacs.

 

[Alternator]

I think regardless of whether or not you would perform such a search, Google checked their data against the disease centre's data and found it was aligning.

It sounds interesting and potentially helpful at any rate.

 

[gm0n3y]

Its true, data mining searches has a lot of potential for out of box ideas like this.