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Comment by mdisraeli | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting and a much needed discussion, however it too completely ignores a key difference:

CDC tracks hospitalisation based on lab reports, GFT tracks search terms

The assumption, which admittedly Google is making, is that these two are correlated by the same amount each year. However, in periods of economic downturn without free health care, people are going to search more and seek actual medial assistance less. Given the global economy has been shot for the last six years....

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   > CDC tracks hospitalisation based on lab reports, GFT tracks search terms

This is the key difference, and after 5 years it is clear that this is not a valid way to predict the flu, or even monitor it. I think it was a great experiment, and thought it was pretty creative when announced, and now it should either be retired or replaced with a new hypothesis. Because as the Mythbusters would say, this myth is busted.

I disagree, but it depends what you mean by "the flu". If you mean hospitalisations, then yes, you're entirely right. If you mean lost productivity and population health outside of hospital, however, perhaps we need a better means to track this other than indirectly via either current stat.

The CDC also uses a outpatient physician network to report cases of influenza-like illness in the community.

I didn't know that, thank you! I went digging to try and find exactly what figure Google were using, and exactly how CDC came up with it, but I couldn't manage to pin them down...

One article author says the idea behind GFT has merit:

I think, actually, the core idea is a terrific one.

From [1]. [1] also has professor and doctor state that her models improved after adding GFT data. Data from search behavior does not have to replace CDC data. It can improve it. No myth.

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/03/13/289802934/googles...

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