Search engine to use online queries to predict health trends before official health bodies

Google already has a window into our souls through our internet searches and it now has insight into our ailing bodies too.

The internet giant is using its vast database of individual search terms to predict the emergence of flu up to two weeks before government epidemiologists.

Google Flu Trends uses the tendency of people to seek online help for their health problems.

By tracking searches for terms such as 'cough', 'fever' and 'aches and pains' it claims to be able to accurately estimate where flu is circulating.

Google tested the idea in nine regions of the US and found it could accurately predict flu outbreaks between seven and 14 days earlier than the federal centres for disease control and prevention.

Google hopes the idea could also be used to help track other diseases. Flu Trends is limited to the US.

Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebb, two software engineers involved in the project, said: "Patterns in Google search queries can be very informative."

In a blogpost on the project they wrote: "It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take one-two weeks to collect and release surveillance data but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly.

"By making our estimates available each day, Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza."

They explained that private information health would be kept confidential. " Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymised, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week."

A paper on the project has been accepted by the respected journal Nature.

"This seems like a clever way of using data that is created unintentionally by the users of Google to see patterns in the world that would otherwise be invisible," Thomas Malone, a professor at the MIT Sloan school of management, told the New York Times.

在官方的健康组织还没有发布健康趋势之前,搜索引擎就能利用网上的搜索查询内容来预测它。

在我们用Google进行网上搜索的时候, 她已经打开我们心灵的窗户，现在她又要洞察我们的病体。这个互联网的巨人正在利用她收集到的无数个人搜索词汇数据赶在政府流行病学家之前两个星期来预测流感的出现。

Google流感趋势项目就是利用了人们在网上对他们的健康问题寻求帮助的趋势来预测流感。通过追踪像“咳嗽”，“发烧”和“疼痛”这样的词汇，它表明已经能够准确地判断流感在哪里扩散。Google在美国的九个地区就这一观点做了测试并且发现她比联邦疾病控制和预防中心提前了7到14天准确预测了流感的爆发。Google希望这一发现同样能帮助预测别的流行病。流感预测目前也只是限于在美国。

参与这一项目的两名软件工程师Jeremy Ginsberg 和Matt Mohebb 说, “ Google搜索显示的数据分布模式非常有价值。” 他们还在关于这一项目的日志中写到: 结果是传统的流感监测系统要用一到两个星期来收集和发布监测数据而Google搜索查询统计却是在很短的时间内自动完成的。“通过我们每天的评估，流感趋势项目可以为流感的爆发提供一个早期预警系统。”

他们还解释说，会为私人的健康信息保密。“流感趋势项目绝不用来透漏个人使用者的身份，因为我们依靠匿名的汇总的计数来知道一定的查询内容在每个星期发生的频率。”

著名期刊《自然》已经准备刊登关于这一项目的论文。麻省理工学院斯隆商学院的教授Thomas Malone在接受《纽约时报》采访时说,“使用Google 用户无意创造的数据来看世界上原本看不见的模式,这看起来是一个聪明的做法。”