Google long ago left behind the realms of just another search engine and is now responsible for an incredible range of products and services, none of which have had the capacity to save lives, until now. The newly announced Google Flu Trends has the capacity to track the movement and occurrences of the influenza virus, and potentially provide an early warning system for an epidemic.

Flu is a huge killer responsible for the deaths of up to 500,000 people every year. Keeping tabs on the virus as it sweeps across countries and continents is of the utmost importance in order to try and prevent a pandemic of the kind seen in 1918, which is estimated to have killed 100 million people.

Governments and health organizations around the world already do this, but data collected from doctors and patients takes time to collate. So Google decided to try and provide faster and more accurate data on the march of the illness by using search data.

The effort was announced on the Official Google Blog and is part of the Google.org initiative, the philanthropic arm of Google which is aiming to change the world for the better. The basic way Google Flu Trends works is by collecting search data in a similar way to Google Hot Trends does for every subject under the sun.

Each day, the search queries relating to flu, influenza, flu symptoms and the like are compiled and used to estimate how many people are suffering from the virus on any given day. The location of each patient can even be garnered by noting where the search originated. This aspect may worry privacy rights advocates but when the end goal is as positive as this I doubt many will complain.

Google has worked closely with the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the initiative, with the search quereies being complimentary to the raw doctor-collected data. But while Google’s data is bang up to date, it’s estimated that the CDC’s is around two weeks behind, meaning the Flu Trends data could be the first looked at when determining if we’re on the verge of an epidemic or pandemic.

Related:

Entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 4:54 pm under Google, Health, Internet, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
Stumble It!