The search engine biggie, Google, is putting the power of the Web to use for a good cause- tracking the onset of influenza in the United States through studying patterns in search queries of its users!
Google Flu Trends, a new tool unveiled by the Internet giant on Tuesday, counts the number of flu-related queries on the Google search engine and provides estimates on influenza outbreaks in the 50 US states.
"We found that there's a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week," Google said in a posting on its official blog.
"If we tally each day's flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness."
Google said it had shared its results with the Atlanta-based US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which does its own flu tracking.
"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," Google said.
"Together we saw that our search-based flu estimates had a consistently strong correlation with real CDC surveillance data," it said.
The company cautioned that Google Flu Trends, which can be seen online at google.org/flutrends, is "still very experimental," but said it could possibly be a useful tool in preventing the spread of other diseases.
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