Google has more than 60% market share for its search engine and when problems come, many Internet users will use Google to search for solutions. This is similar to when there is a sickness outbreak people will search on Google for flu-related keywords.
Google is going to introduce this new method of finding any possible of flu outbreak in the United States, based on the search for the flu-related keywords on Google. It’ll be a tool to be released by Google to the federal government of the United States.
The tool presents the data gathered from web searches for flu-related keywords to notify health agencies where an outbreak might be happening. The method definitely benefits a lot, with be very helpful to prevent the outbreak of sicknesses. Since Internet population is growing, and more and more to use Google, it’ll become a great tool to find out any possible outbreak not only in the US and also to be extended to every corner in this world.
Lets read what Google says about their new methodology below:
We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.
During the 2007-2008 flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share results each week with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC. Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, we were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports.
CDC uses a variety of methods to track influenza across the United States each year. One method relies on a network of more than 1500 doctors who see 16 million patients each year. The doctors keep track of the percentage of their patients who have an influenza-like illness, also known as an “ILI percentage”. CDC and state health departments collect and aggregate this data each week, providing a good indicator of overall flu activity across the United States.
So why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.
via [medgadget]
November 16th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
[...] Google has a new app for your iPhone, which allows iPhone users to use voice commands to search Google. The Google voice search app is free for the iPhone users. [...]