Search Giant Watches Search Words in Effort to Track Spread of Viruses
A collaboration between Google and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has yielded an online tool that may help people know about flu outbreaks even more quickly than existing surveillance methods.
The new tool, called Google Flu Trends, will monitor search trends to see abnormally large numbers of searches for the flu and related terms. It will then publish a map of affected areas in its new service.
Google says its new system will be able to detect influenza outbreaks up to two weeks faster than the traditional surveillance systems in use.
Read more: abcnews.go.com
