Here’s a rather awesome use of data mining that had never even occurred to me, which is why Page and Brin are gazillionaires and I am not.<\/p>\n
People who are sick have a tendency to type their symptoms into an internet search engine. Google has been looking at spikes in searches on flu symptoms, and have found that they are able to detect regional outbreaks of flu up to ten days before the CDC does. (This is because the CDC relies upon compiled reports from thousands of health care providers, whereas Google has the data compiled for it by its users.)<\/p>\n
Google Flu Trends avoids privacy pitfalls by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be traced to individual searchers. To develop the service, Google\u2019s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others. <\/p>\n
Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped it onto the C.D.C.\u2019s reports of influenzalike illness. Google found a strong correlation between its data and the reports from the agency, which advised it on the development of the new service.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There are a couple of sites dedicated to tracking the spread of infectious diseases, such as Who Is Sick<\/A>, but they require people to visit their site and enter information about their illness. The beauty of Google’s method is that it’s a by-product of something that users were doing anyway.<\/p>\n
I think it goes without saying that this kind of creative trend analysis is only the beginning. I for one welcome our new Google overlords.<\/p>\n
Link<\/A> (via Discover<\/A>)<\/I><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here’s a rather awesome use of data mining that had never even occurred to me, which is why Page and Brin are gazillionaires and I am not. People who are sick have a tendency to type their symptoms into an internet search engine. Google has been looking at spikes in searches on flu symptoms, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1415"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1417,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415\/revisions\/1417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}