While doctors may gripe about the increasing number of patients that arrive in their offices with WebMD printouts and search-engine-assisted self diagnoses, Google sees it as opportunity.Today, Google.org (the philanthropic arm of the Google monster) unveiled Google Flu Trends, a web tool that will track flu outbreaks based on user-generated search terms.
Flu Trends works because the Google search box is so often the first place people turn at the first sign of a sniffle.The company says Flu Trends could alert users to flu activity in their area up to two weeks ahead of traditional systems like emergency room reports.
To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others. Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped the ...
