Does it feel like everyone around you has a cold? Turns out that might be true, and Google has the data to prove it.
The search engine giant on Tuesday launched Google Flu Trends, which will provide up-to-date flu-related activity estimate for all 50 states in the U.S. Google will combine flu-related queries entered into its search engine with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to track cases of the flu throughout the country.
"We found that there's a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week," Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebbi, Google software engineers, wrote in a blog post. "As a result, if we tally each day's flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness."
I guess the fact that I know this probably qualifies me as a huge GEEK- But gee- where the flu is strongest is information I need to know-!
2 comments:
Gives a new meaning to the term Google it! Gosh big brother is watching!
Carol
Do you get the feeling a few people at Google have too much time in their hands?
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