Developments in Google Flu Trends

GT first reported about Google Flu Trends last year fall, or in other words: flu season. By the time flu season is rolling around this year, Google Flu Trends has added 16 countries, and it available in 37 languages. Google Flu Trends has come a long way, considering it only exists for a year.

The interesting this about the way Flu Trends is set up, is that Google figured out which search queries actually predict whether the flu is breaking out in a region. Typing in queries like “swine flu” will not prompt Google Flu Trends to think you have the swine flu. Many people are typing this into Google just to figure out what it means. It happens all too often with issues that are hyped up by the media, so Google was smart enough to figure out some things should not be considered to predict flu trends. Of course, Google would never expose exactly which search terms they do and do not take into consideration when compiling their data. They did explain how they figured out which search terms to use; they simply compared the data obtained by the CDC in terms of reported flu cases to the search data for different flu related search terms. It’s pretty cool to see the comparisons they made, and how nicely the graphs from the CDC and the Google search data can line up.

Google shows this comparison, and explains how Flu Trends works, in a video. It also shows Google can predict a flu outbreak two weeks before the CDC can accurately report on it: