flu trends - ReadWriteWeb

Google Launches Flu Trends For 121 U.S. Cities

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:40:07 -0800

Google just launched an updated version of Google Flu Trends, a service that predicts flu trends by tracking flu-related queries on the company's search engine. Until now, Google only showed aggregate data for states in the United States. Starting today, Flu Trends will show data down to the city level for 121 cities. As Google notes in today's announcement, this update was timed to coincide with National Influenza Vaccination Week.

]]> Google also offers Flu Trends data on a country level for Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and most of Western Europe. Data on Flu Trends is updated daily.

By tracking flu-related queries, Google has already proven to be able to accurately predict the flu levels on a state and country level. It looks like Google now feels like its algorithms are accurate enough to predict influenza trends on a more granular level. Until Google is able to validate this data, however, the company is labeling the city level estimates as "experimental."

Google and Google.org - Google's non profit foundation - sponsor a number of influenza-related projects. Google, for example, now offers a vaccine-finding map and the company is working with the Public Library of Science (PLoS) to to give give scientists a place to collaborate and share research on influenza research on Google Knol.

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Tracking Influenza: Google Flu Trends Now Covers 16 More Countries

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:53:45 -0800

Google just announced a major expansion of its Flu Trends program which monitors searches for Flu-related symptoms on Google's search engine to predict Flu outbreaks. Until now, Google only made the data it gathered from searches in the U.S., Mexico, Australia and New Zealand available, but now, Google has expanded the product to cover 16 more countries, including Russia, Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, Poland and Spain.

]]> Flu Trends launched last November, and a lot of people were skeptical about whether Google's data could really be used to track the spread of the flu. According to Google's own research (PDF), which was published in Nature earlier this year, Flu Trends had a 0.92 correlation with the official flu data. Now, with the help of data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Google was also able to validate its models for flu-related queries in Europe. The official data is usually a week or two behind, but Google's data is created in real time.

Google has been very active in the Flu research community. Just a few weeks ago, the company also announced a partnership with the Public Library of Science, which now uses Google Knol to publish data and papers about influenza research.

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Google Releases Experimental Flu Trends for Mexico

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:05:05 -0800

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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