Google = Cool

The reason to admire Google is that it is constantly offering innovative services. For instance, Google News, especially the archives search that extends back to nineteen-dickety-two, is God's gift to any deeply hooked information junkie or keyboard historian.

The latest nifty service from the company, and specifically from its nonprofit arm, Google.org, is a graphic flu tracker, based on the use of web search terms (through Google's search engine, no doubt) by geographic location (that is, a user's IP number). Google created the tracker after observing that the rise in influenza cases, as documented by the CDC, paralleled the search for relevant information on the web. But unlike the CDC's surveillance information, Google's program anticipates influenza trends ahead of the CDC's retrospectively reported case data. An explanation of how the thing works is provided here.

The WSJ Health Blog reports that Google Trends offers the opportunity to monitor any geographic time-trend in Google's web searches, whether it's for "botulism" or "brangelina."