We think of the Web as a place to seek information. But the act of seeking creates new information: Local trends in Web searches can create a meaningful snapshot of what’s going on at a particular time and place.
The folks at Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, have capitalized on this to create Google Flu Trends, a Web site that aims to map flu outbreaks by monitoring searches for terms like “flu,” “muscle aches” and “fever.”
We’d really like to see a solid, peer-reviewed study of how well this thing works. But until that paper is published, we’ll rely on the opinion of the head of the CDC’s flu surveillance team: Flu Trends “maps very closely to the influenza-like trends that we see in the U.S.,” she tells the WSJ.
The system uses aggregated data that can’t be traced to individual users, the New York Times says.
If you’re very, very clever and have a lot of spare time on your hands, you can build your own version of Flu Tracker for any social phenomenon you like: Google Trends, a service that’s been around for a while, allows anybody with an Internet connection to track how the volume of searches for a given term changes over time.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment