The simplicity of genius
Monday, March 9th, 2009 | Uncategorized
I’ve just come across a feature of Google that I’ve not been aware of before - it’s probably old news to most of you, but I just have to do a little virtual jumping up and down about this.
We all know that Google has access to almost limitless amounts of information form all our searches and clicks and that it is aggregated somewhere and can be put to a multitude of uses. This particular feature is called Google Flu Trends and uses the search data that we all (or rather so far just the americans) contribute to provide an accurate picture of flu activity across the population.
Turns out that when the flu is arond people make flu-related searches on Google (surprise, surprise!), and that aggregating this data provides a more accurate and up-to-date picture of a flu epidemic than U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. They even published their results in Nature - now, that’s what I call distributed cognition!
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