Google tracks human health
Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?
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 found 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. Our results have been published in Nature.
How’s this for sharing values?
2 Responses to 'Google tracks human health'
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It is intriguing. But I don’t believe it means much. I saw the graph and the numbers are a bit inconsistent. I just think that a good deal of people happen to like to look up random things that come to mind. So if someone is mindlessly procrastinating *raises hand* then they will search for things that come to mind. And if that happens in winter, then the flu may come to mind due to its prominence. Or they may know someone with it and that’s why they thought of it or what have you. Idk, data like that just doesn’t hold much ground with me.
Jason Blumstein
17 Dec 08 at 2:59 pm
Honestly, I am more amazed that I was able to find this website by googling my own name. Two search results came up for this site. I find that quite amazing personally. Maybe if I create a wikipage of myself, that will come up too. *ponders*
Jason Blumstein
24 Dec 08 at 3:49 am