Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Epidemic outbreak detection using search engine!!!!

Is it possible to detect a disease outbreak in an area using no pathological techniques but a search engine? For example, is it possible to detect Dengue fever outbreak in Cochin using internet..... It is!!!! 

Google has done just that. They have launched "flu trends" to detect flu outbreaks in an area by analyzing the data in their huge database. It seems that by analysing how many people search flu-related topics from an area, it is possible to predict how many people actually have flu symptoms. Google says "By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in
 various regions of the US".
And guess what, the trend Google predicts surprising
ly resembles closely the actual data that 
CDC (Centre for Disease Control) produces every
 year.

You can check it out here: http://www.google.org/flutrends/

Another off-the track application of the search data that google gathers everyday..... 


Now the question, Can Google save the world someday???? 

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