This entry was posted on
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at
5:28 pm and is filed
under Geekage.

Via Gary Andrews:

RWW – Google Flu Trends: A Glimpse into the Future of Google Health: It stands to reason that people who are “starting to come down with something” often take the opportunity to search for information on what ails them, even before they discuss their symptoms with a healthcare professional. Who gets more of those searches than anyone? Google, of course. When Google started looking more closely at anonymous aggregate searches for “flu symptoms” and the like, they discovered that – after cross-referencing that data against information from the Center for Disease Control – they had the ability to predict flu outbreaks by monitoring search patterns. And now, they’ve published their findings as Google Flu Trends.

A-maz-ing.

When will the UK version be ready?

How soon before we’re tracking specific outbreaks of STIs and the like?

(Seeing as you’re probably already giggling, I’ll ask you to imagine an STI report just after the weather; “… and visitors to Kent should be aware that there’s a higher-than-normal likelihood of herpes this afternoon, with chances of scattered syphilis.”)

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UPDATE – When will the UK version be ready? Tom has an update on that.

(I asked Tom about the flying cars thing while I was there, but he wasn’t having any of it. Still, we have this, which I’m dying to [pun] road test [/pun] myself.)