Google Fighting a Virus and Publishing in Nature

Google didn’t grow to the company it is today by just being interested in simple search queries. If any company has succeeded to transform ’search’ into a business, and develop
countless applications that spin-off from it, it’s Google. Think Google Adsense, Google Maps, Tool Bar, etc. Now, Google is going academic and using its search data to help health researchers, and I’m not talking about Google Scholar.

Google Goes Scientific

As a scientist myself I was intrigued, and surprised, to see Google managed to accomplish what many researchers around the world secretly wish for their entire career: a publication in the journal Nature.

Nature is a very prestigious journal that publishes groundbreaking research findings in many different disciplines. Basically, getting a publication in Nature is – in plain English – a very big deal.

Google Detects Influenza Epidemics

Next time you consider getting a flu shot, you might want to check with Google as well as your doctor. Google has developed ‘Google Flu Trends’, a program that allows you to ‘track’ the spread of influenza across different regions of the United States.

Google tracks the spread of the flu by looking at ‘flu-related’ search queries. Basically, it correlates the number of Google searches for flu-related topics to the number of people who likely have the flu. This means Google can keep taps on the likely spread and severity of an influenza outbreak. It goes without saying that this is pretty important data, if it really accurately models what is going on.

Why Google Cares

Why would Google want to track the spread of the flu? After all, doesn’t the CDC keep track of these things? It does… but Google can do this, too, faster:

• It takes the CDC two weeks to put out data about flu-related doctor’s visits
• Google has a one day reporting lag
• Thanks to this, major outbreaks can be detected faster by Google than by the CDC

In all fairness; the CDC uses very different reporting methods than Google, which are actually based on the number of people visiting a doctor with flu-like symptoms. However, you can’t say one is more accurate than the other. A lot of people who have the flu never even visit a doctor; they might actually just do a Google search for symptoms and treatment, and tuck into bed for a few days.

This graph also shows that Google’s data matches the CDC’s data surprisingly well:

flu virus - photo courtesy of wikipedia

With influenza killing over 500.000 people a year worldwide, it can be very useful to have a ‘quick and dirty’ method of seeing whether your region is badly infected. This has endless applications; from directing where to allocate more flu shots to prevention campaigns. All Google needs to do next is to expand this tool for users outside the US! It really is only useful in areas where a large number of people have access to, and use, the internet. But that does include more areas than just the United States!

This really is just the beginning, with the results looking as promising as they do, there are endless other disease predictions Google make in the future.

Want to find out more about how Google Flu Trends works? You can easily see an overview, and go deeper by learning more about the research that went into this project, as well as download the raw data.

In the mean time: a big congrats to Google for making it into Nature. There are now new (scientific) reasons to love and envy our favorite search engine.

What do you think about Flu Trends? Do you think you might use it?