Google Can Predict Flu Epidemics
Four years ago, Google launched Google Flu Trends, which estimates the prevalence of flu outbreaks based on how many people are searching for things like “fever” or “flu medication.” The search metrics have tracked incredibly closely with Center for Disease Control data (as you can see above).
Full article by Sarah Kliff at Ezra Klein’s blog in The Washington Post.
Fascinating.
That chart is uncanny.
Is this predicting the epidemic or simply doing what Target did for pregnant women–looking at what people are buying and then predicting the number of people in a particular condition?
I’m wondering the same thing as Linda.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
I heard Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, speak at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Business Economics in San Francisco. He has done some pretty amazing things with Google ads using game theory. I don’t know if he had a hand in the development of Google Flu Trends, but this is another example of how data mining can lead to some interesting findings. I do wish Google had a way to: 1) deactivate targeted advertising by deleting unwanted cookies from your computer; and 2) deleting your profile in Google’s database based on Google search history. I realize Google owns the website and we use it at our own peril. But the phone company isn’t allowed to record who we call, monitor our phone calls for key words and assemble a database of individual preferences based on the information.
Devon’s comment is spot on. Can you imagine how much data google has access too? Far, far more than the CDC and while it isnt as specific, enough of it is close enough to the subject this article is referencing to be a highly corrolative as is shown in the chart.
What I think is more interesting is not that google knows so much, but that the American people know so much. Its not as impressive that Google has so much data, that is well known, but it is really impressive that America is so well informed about the the spread of influenza that the use of the internet to research its communicability almost exactly mirrors its actual spread. This reveals not only that people are well informed but that people become more concerned exactly in line with how much it spreads. Consider how different this would have been even 15 years ago. Consider how different it would have been 50 years ago.
I would be interested in knowing how this knowledge changes among different demographics. How well do poor populations mirror this trend versus the affluent? Black versus white? and so on, and what does this mean for how information is valued and dessiminated throughout our society.