There are lots of uses for tracking search data, not the least of which is to gauge popular sentiment.  When a particular subject is hot it tends to drive more and more traffic to websites based off of keyword searches in popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.  If you want to know what’s hot you can take a peek at the top search terms and zero right in on trends in real time.

Google even provides real-time data on keyword trend at www.google.com/trends complete with rankings and ‘hotness’ scale.  They even show historical search trends so you can gauge trends as they emerge.  Google has also come up with one of the most interesting uses of search trends ever.

Google found that by analyzing search terms that apply to flu symptoms they were able to track flu outbreaks ahead of the CDC’s own tracking data.  They are using this data to provide real-time flu trend statistics for the U.S.  These statistics can be found at www.google.org/flutrends. You can even download the statistics in CSV format for your own use - not sure what you would do with them, but they are there.

Working with the CDC, Google found that their data was very accurate compared to the official CDC outbreak data but preceded it by one to two weeks.  In essence, Google is looking at real time flu outbreaks by monitoring symptoms well in advance of the official word of the CDC.  This is an excellent example how the appropriate application of technology can completely replace tried and true methods virtually overnight.

Obviously, security of search data is a concern so Google takes pains to explain that the data being shown is aggregate search data so there is no way to look down into one particular search, just the results of millions of searches.

So, you want to know when the flu is on it’s way - take a look at www.google.org/flutrend and be one step ahead of the Government - not a bad thing at all.  Now if we can just get Google to aggregate the searches from our federal officials to find out when the next big tax hike is coming we will really be sitting pretty!

Tags: flu, google, search

This entry was posted on Friday, January 2nd, 2009 at 9:16 am and is filed under General. 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.