Google Uses Web Searches to Track Flu’s Spread

nytimes.com

16 points·peter123··6 comments

There must be so many innovative uses of real time search data. I can't imagine what people would come up with if they opened it up. I suppose there are some privacy issues to work out of course.

I wonder if companies with that kind of data are ever tempted by insider trading? For example, imagine if you saw all kinds of job searches coming out of IP addresses known to belong to say GM. You'd get a head start on shorting the stock.

The only problem, as was demonstrated with the AOL fiasco, is that many people use their searches to target themselves. It's very easy to track some percentage of the world's population down by looking at their search history.

That and if opening search data became known, people would suddenly start restraining their searches. And caution's something I'd rather not have enter the search process.

Larry Brilliant (google.org director) has been interested in using online data gathering for predicting and containing outbreaks for a while.

Mining google search queries is a step up from Brilliant's previously advocated method of automatically correlating reports of illness from news outlets around the world.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/larry_brilliant_wants_to_...

This is very smart. Other things to monitor in real time: allergies, weird disease symptoms, SAD and other mental symptoms, flooding?, crime.

It's too bad that "flu" is often used for many things besides influenza, most notably the stomach flu which usually lasts 24 hours. That's way more common than influenza. I run across a lot of people that even think the "flu shot" is for those kinds of flus...

A concrete example of why its not always terrible to have logs data sitting around.

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