Google Flu Trends- Tommy

Google Flu Trends

above you see an example of how the flu trend works.

Below is a link to see what the flu activity is in your region.

     Google search isn't just about looking up football scores from last weekend or finding a great hotel for your next vacation. It can also be used for the public good. Yesterday, Google announced Google Flu Trends, which uses collected search data in an effort to confront the challenge of influenza outbreaks.

What does it do?

By taking Google Trends — where you can see snapshots of what's on the "public's collective mind" — and applying the tool to a public health problem, our engineers found that there was a correlation between flu-related queries and the actual flu. They created a model for near real-time estimates about outbreaks, in the hopes that both health care professionals and the general public would use this tool to better prepare for flu season.

Since google Flu Trends launched yesterday, the response from the medical community has been positive. "The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place," said Dr. Lyn Finelli of the influenza division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to The New York Times. "This could prevent cases of influenza." You can check out the tool for yourself.

Why did they make this?

Google built this Flu Trends by looking at history to figure where it hits. Because flu season is different every year, just a few months of data wouldn't have done the trick. For example, the 2003-2004 flu season was unusually severe in many regions. The data from that season was especially robust and allowed us to discover a more accurate, reliable set of flu-related terms. To learn more about how we built the system, see this page on how Flu Trends works.

    In order to provide a rough geographic breakdown of potential flu outbreaks, google uses "IP address information from our server logs to make a best guess about where queries originate". To protect your privacy, we anonymize those IP addresses at nine months. And they don't provide this aggregated, anonymized data to third parties. This is important feature because it will minimize personal information fraud.

    I think with this new technology the flu will effect less people every year. Before this technology, 5 to 20 percent of people were affected by flu last year. With this new great technology businesses could remind workers to get the flu shot when the flu activity is high around the given area. With this warning it might be enough to lower the percent or maybe even totally eliminate the flu altogether. But for now all we can do is wait and see the results.