Google Flu Trends: Track the Spread of Influenza in Your State

Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=361040

Monitoring social trends this way is very cool. I wonder if they could help predict things like consumer confidence index similarly.

Unfortunately, the information is after-the-fact.

http://www.google.org/about/flutrends/how.html

"So why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza."

Sounds as though it could still be useful. Not that there is much you can do in response.