Information is power, and power is information! We can extract patterns and insightfull features and make extrapolations about the future. We may not realise this but without breaking any terms of acceptable data use or data protection, Google inc. has access to aggregated dataset on search querries. Surprisingly this offers a lot more than one would imagine. Each querry can be associated with a geographical location, precise time, simillar querries made, previous pages the user was on before visiting google, the browser or even operating system used... and even much deeper demographicall knowledge based on user profiles (in case the user is logged into google-mail or for that matter any of the many google services).
Google inc. naturally realised this and started to make serrious use of aggregated search querries data. See this page for google's stand on this. They recently partnered up with U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to research influenza trend forecasting using their querry datasets. The website is available here, check it out.
On google.org an analysis for the future flu season is provided. What is interesting however is that the influenza season in Australia and New Zealand is not really that bad and when past flu seasons are incorporated into the overall picture one can gain the strong impression that this comming flu season will not be all that bad!!
and in the US:
See and judge for yourself
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