It looks like the Mountain View giant is not content with dealing with online viruses these days - now Google is set to predict the spread of flu out in the non-virtual world. According to The Guardian, the search engine has set its massive data-collecting power the task of collating information about the disease and has launched a site that claims to be able to raise the alarm over flu outbreaks up to two weeks before the existing public services.As the search engine continues to advance in so many disparate fields, you can't help thinking someone out there is saying 'anything you can do, Google can do better'.
Using the technology developed for Google Trends, Google has created Google Flu Trends - a system that analyses various flu-related search terms across America. Google engineers claim that the resulting aggregated trends give them the potential ability to predict rises in flu cases and that they were a strong indicator of flu levels in America.
Google compared its results to statistics filed by the US centres for Disease Control over the last five years to ascertain the potential accuracy of its data. Science journal Nature will publish the results of Google's comparisons with official health statistics.
According to The Guardian, Jeremy Ginsberg, a Google engineer involved in developing the system said: "We wanted to step back and see if we couldn't model a real-world phenomenon using search query data . . . We found we could highly accurately estimate what the flu activity levels would be in subsequent years."
The new move from Google adds to its previous investigations into digital detection technology designed to apply online information to public health mapping. It is already exploring ways of combining collated health information with other services, such as Google Maps, and looking into a tool that allows users to store personal health information on Google sites.
Google, often in hot water for its privacy policies, has insisted that there are no privacy issues involved in its new offering as the trends are aggregated using millions of anonymous searches. But, as it hopes to extend the service to other countries and potentially other illnesses, the search engine will be well advised to take the temperature of civil liberty groups as well as compiling the amount of people looking to lower theirs.
