My friend showed me a very interesting article from Wednesday's New York Times that relates to our discussion of communication technology and its many possibilities...
Basically, Google thinks that "it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
Why?
An increasing number of Americans search for topics such as Flu Symptoms when they suspect they might be coming down with something. Since Google can track searches and their frequency, it is developing "a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks, called Google Flu Trends."
Through comparisons with CDC report dates and dates of increased flu-related Google searches, Google has recognized that people are turning to the search engine before they contact their doctors, and plan to use this data to provide information such as where an outbreak may occur in the US.
Just another example of the many possibilities for large-scale, technologically based communication!
Helft, Miguel. 2008. Aches, a Sneeze, a Google search. The New York Times: 12 November 2008, page A1 and A23.
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1 comment:
I saw that too! That is just so cool! I really give kudos to Google throughout the past five years or so -- they have been really innovative at creating such useful tools. We have been talking about whether technology's consequences are "good" or "bad," determining that it's all about how people choose to use it.
Google has caught up in this controversy because of the amount of data it retains in order to make web searches better (terrible for privacy). But on the other hand, it has created Google Earth and searches for Maps, Documents, Books, Scholarly Articles, Images, etc. It hosts video and has a terrific email service. It has Google Documents and Calendars... and I love Google news. Basically I live my life on Google. And now the flu symptoms... This could feed into the privacy controversy, as Google knows what you are searching for.
For some reason, your post made me think of the blog FiveThirtyEight.com... this blogger got so famous for his accurate election projections. And he calculated them by taking into account every national and local poll he could find, using historical data to weight them for accuracy. This is such an enormous undertaking! And it is only possible because of the rapid speed and widespread availability of the Internet.
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