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Google Uses Searches To Track Flu
'Flu' Searches Closely Mirror Actual Influenza Cases, CDC Says
Benjamin Grove, Staff Writer
UPDATED: 9:37 am EST November 13, 2008
Just in time for flu season, Google has launched Google Flu Trends -- a Web site that uses flu-related searches to track influenza outbreaks.
Health officials say the chief benefit of Google's Web site is the speed of its data.
Google tracks where flu queries are made and can update the data daily for the new Web site, which shows flu-search activity by state. By comparison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gathers data on actual flu cases from doctors and patients for reports that are typically a week behind real time.
Public health officials are intrigued by the fact that Google's flu searches closely mirror actual cases tracked by the CDC.
Google compared aggregated flu search data -- hundreds of billions of individual searches going back to 2003 -- to the CDC's actual flu trend data. There is a close correlation, said Lyn Finelli, chief of the CDC's influenza surveillance division.
"This is a very innovative approach to surveillance, and the CDC is always interested in innovative approaches," Finelli said. "We're really excited about these electronic sources of data."
Critics warn not to put too much reliance on the Google data. Flaws include the fact that not everyone who googles "flu" has the flu.
"Some of this data may be extremely noisy," said Philip Polgreen, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa and author of a study based on flu searches on Google's search rival Yahoo.
That study also concluded that such searches can be helpful in the early detection of flu patterns. Internet searches could hold promise in the detection of other diseases, Polgreen said.
"Certainly, availability to more information is good," said Polgreen, who is also director of Infectious Disease Society of America's emerging infections network. "It's an exciting topic at the interface of computer science, epidemiology and clinical medicine."
Google's Web site offers users an interactive map to get a quick description of flu-search activity in their state. On Wednesday, most states had "low" or "minimal" activity, according to the Web site. Six states already had "moderate" activity: Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine and Mississippi.
Users of the Web site also will find a line graph for each state and one for the entire nation that show previous years' search results by month. Generally, flu searches tend to increase in November and then rise and dip before falling off through February and March.
According to a post on the Google blog, Google engineers had suspected that they could provide federal officials and the public with more timely information about where the flu was spreading by analyzing the locations of searchers who were googling certain flu-related queries.
Between 5 and 20 percent of Americans contract the flu each year, according to the CDC. With more up-to-date information, public health officials potentially can respond more quickly to smaller seasonal outbreaks. Doctors and health officials might use the data in making decisions about testing patients and notifying emergency room staffs, as well as decisions about vaccination stockpiles and communications to the public, Finelli said.
An early warning of an outbreak could be especially important in the case of a highly rare pandemic like the one that struck the U.S. in 1918, Google noted.
Google officials stress that their system is experimental. They also say that user privacy is completely protected. The company explains on the Google blog that its data was taken based on "anonymized" aggregated counts used to track broad patterns, not single out individual users.
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