Google could have caught swine flu early

Bad headline, Wired. Should read, "detected swine flu", instead of "caught swine flu".

I was watching a show about a computer system that monitors the Internet and other traditional media and shows what words and phrases (all languages) are rising through the chatter. It could have been for the NSA or Wall Street, I forget, but it's very interesting to see how all that supposedly random noise can be sifted to show new trends.

It would be nice to see some actual data rather than just that graph. If you look at the graph your eye is drawn to the dramatic upswing in the 2009 line, but is all of that upswing before media reports? It's unclear from the presentation.

Also, if you look at the data from previous years there's also an upswing in a similar timeframe.

What's needed is some concrete analysis of the data so that you can see if there was a detectable deviation from the norm prior to media reports. Unfortunately, Google has not released the historical data for Mexico (they've released it for the US only).