Google is great for all kinds of reasons, other than the fact if they ever go away I will basically loose all the information I have created or gathered in the last 8 years, but that aside….
Google has come up with google flu trends.  Based on google search criteria in different regions of the US google is attemping to predict the severity or flu infection across the world.   From Google:

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. Our results have been published in the journal Nature.

Check out http://www.google.org/flutrends/ for more info and all kinds of cool graphs proving that you will get sick and that you will be googleing while in bed.

Tags: Survival, swine flu

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Survival. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.