What if you could see people wandering around the streets saying, “Can you tell me about the flu? I might have the flu? Do you think I have the flu?” You might think that — well, maybe there’s some flu going on.
Google is announcing it can help the Centers for Disease Control identify flu outbreaks weeks before the CDC can do so. While CDC reporting based on doctors’ reports lags by a few weeks, Google has found that doing analytics on search terms like “flu symptoms” and “muscle aches” provides graphs showing upticks that mirror (a week or two later, when the reporting catches up) the CDC info.
Sure, not all the searches on “flu” indicate that someone has the flu — but over vast numbers, it seems to track pretty well. It’s vaguely creepy (though Google says it is not tracking or reporting individual queries), but also really interesting, and it could provide a few critical weeks advance notice if a flu epidemic or pandemic gets started.
So, we really need to hope they don’t start seeing an uptick in searches for ‘bleeding from orifices,’ ‘ebola’ and ‘aaaaaaaaaarrrrrr . . .. . .’, and if they do, will they alert the CDC?