Google Releases Experimental Flu Trends for Mexico
Google just launched an experimental version of Flu Trends that focuses only on the current flu outbreak in Mexico. Google Flu Trends, which was launched last November, tracks and maps flu-related search queries to predict how many people in a given region actually have the flu. Google stresses that Flu Trends for Mexico is only an experimental product, and that it tries to distinguish between topical searches about the flu and searches by users who may actual experience flu symptoms. Given the current interest in the swine flu, a lot of users are obviously looking for general information about it, which could easily skew Google's algorithms.
We already know that Google Flu Trends is indeed a decent indicator for tracking the flu, so it will be interesting to see if Google's data also works for this current outbreak in Mexico. In the U.S. Google was able to validate its estimates using data from the CDC about actual flu trends and according to some estimates, Flu Trends registers these trends up to two weeks faster than the conventional reports published by the CDC.
For the current epidemic in Mexico, though, Google obviously hasn't had time to validate its data against official data from Mexican authorities, but given the current interest in the topic, Google decided to go ahead and release this as an experimental product.
It would be interesting to see if Facebook could do something similar with Facebook Lexicon, though for now, Facebook only allows users to use this tool to perform relatively general queries.
Update: looks like Facebook actually posted some data about the swine flu today.
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Google Trends is brilliantly cool, I just looked up a new facebook fishing scam (http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=fbaction.net&date=2009-4-29&sa=X). It's brilliant to keep up with the trends.
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This kind of misinformation makes me angry. Please stop positioning Google Flutrends as a "Google invention" and regurgitating Google press releases.
NEWSFLASH: The idea to look at search data as early warning systems for flu outbreaks is not a Google invention, but was actually already proposed over 3 years ago (published 2006), by researchers from the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation and U of T.
Eysenbach G. Infodemiology: tracking flu-related searches on the web for syndromic surveillance. AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2006:244-248
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=17238340
Eysenbach G. Infodemiology and Infoveillance: Framework for an Emerging Set of Public Health Informatics Methods to Analyze Search, Communication and Publication Behavior on the Internet
J Med Internet Res 2009;11(1):e11
URL: http://www.jmir.org/2009/1/e11
The Virus Chasers
http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/35061.html
CIHR Newsarticle (2007) about the infodemiology / infoveillance work at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation in Toronto
This tools is very useful in initial stage, but up to now, as swine flu outbreak is all over world wide, seems not much useful as before.
http://swineflufree.blogspot.com