Google To Assist Feds During A Flu Pandemic Terror

MAP · 11-12-2008, 04:13 AM

Google Flu Trends Site
http://www.google.org/flutrends/

SICK SURVEILLANCE: GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS
Drudge Report Tue Nov 11 2008
http://www.drudgereport.com/flashgof.htm
GOOGLE will launch a new tool that will help federal officials "track sickness"

"Flu Trends" uses search terms that people put into the web giant to figure out where influenza is heating up, and will notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time!

GOOGLE, continuing to work closely with government, claims it would keep individual user data confidential: "GOOGLE FLU TRENDS can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week"
Engineers will capture keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and others
Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at CDC: "One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data. The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used... as early warning signal for flu activity"
Thomas Malone, professor at M.I.T.
"I think we are just scratching the surface of what's possible with collective intelligence"

Eric Schmidt, GOOGLE's chief executive vows: "From a technological perspective, it is the beginning"

Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread
New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: November 11, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctor
That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks called Google Flu Trends
Tests of the new Web tool from Google. org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

In early February, for example, the C.D.C. reported that the flu had recently spiked in the mid-Atlantic states.
But Google says its search data show a spike in queries about flu symptoms two weeks before that report came out Its new service at google. org/flutrends analyzes those searches as they come in, creating graphs and maps of the country that, ideally, will show where the flu is spreading. Some public health experts say the data could help accelerate the response of doctors, hospitals and public health officials to a nasty flu season, reducing the spread of the disease and, potentially, saving lives
“The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, and this could prevent cases of influenza,” said Lyn Finelli, lead for surveillance at the influenza division of the C.D.C.
Between 5 and 20 percent of the nation’s population contracts the flu each year, she said, leading to an average of roughly 36,000 deaths

For now the service covers only the United States, but Google is hoping to eventually use the same technique to help track influenza and other diseases worldwide “From a technological perspective, it is the beginning,” said Eric E.
Schmidt, Google’s chief executive The premise behind Google Flu Trends — what appears to be a fruitful marriage of mob behavior and medicine — has been validated by an unrelated study indicating that the data collected by Yahoo, Google’s main rival in Internet search, can also help with early detection of the flu

“In theory, we could use this stream of information to learn about other disease trends as well,” said Philip M.
Polgreen, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa and a co-author of the study based on Yahoo’s data
Still, some public health officials note that many health departments already use other approaches, like gathering data from visits to emergency rooms, to keep daily tabs on disease trends in their own communities

“We don’t have any evidence that this is more timely than our emergency room data,” said Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene If Google provided health officials with details of the system’s workings so that it could be validated scientifically, the data could serve as an additional way to detect influenza that was free and might prove valuable, said Dr.
Mostashari, who is also chairman of the International Society for Disease Surveillance

A paper on the methodology behind Flu Trends is expected to be published in a future issue of the journal Nature
Researchers have long said that the material people publish on the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that can be used to spot trends and make predictions
But the data collected by search engines is particularly powerful, because the keywords and phrases that people type into search engines represent their most immediate intentions. People may search for “Kauai hotel” when they are planning a vacation and for “foreclosure” when they get in trouble with their mortgage.
Those queries express the world’s collective desires and needs, its wants and likes

Internal research at Yahoo suggests that increases in searches for certain terms can help forecast what technology products will be hits, for instance. Yahoo itself has begun using search traffic to help it decide what material to feature on its site

Two years ago, Google began opening its search data trove through Google Trends, a tool that allows anyone to track the relative popularity of search terms. Google also offers more sophisticated search traffic tools that marketers can use to fine-tune advertising campaigns.
And internally it has tested the use of search data to reach conclusions about economic, marketing and entertainment trends

“Most forecasting is basically trend extrapolation,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. “This works remarkably well, but tends to miss turning points, times when the data changes direction.
Our hope is that Google data might help with this problem”

Prabhakar Raghavan, who is in charge of Yahoo Labs and the company’s search strategy, also said search data could be valuable for forecasters and scientists, but concerns about privacy had generally stopped the company from sharing it with outside academics
Google Flu Trends gets around privacy pitfalls by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be traced back to individual searchers.
To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others

Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped the data onto the C.D.C.’s reports of “influenza-like illness,” which the agency compiles based on data from labs, health care providers, death certificates and other sources. Google found an almost perfect correlation between its data and the C.D.C.
reports “We know it matches very, very well in the way flu developed in the last year,” said Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google. org Dr. Finelli of the C.D.C. and Mr.
Brilliant both cautioned that the data needed to be monitored to ensure that the correlation with flu activity remained valid

Other people have tried to use information collected from Internet users for public health purposes A Web site called whoissick. org, for instance, invites people to report about what ails them and superimposes the results on a map.
But the site has received relatively little traffic, so its usefulness is limited
HealthMap, a project affiliated with Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, scours the Web for news articles, blog posts and electronic newsletters to create a map that tracks emerging infectious diseases around the world It is backed by Google. org, which counts the detection and prevention of diseases as one of its main philanthropic objectives

But Google Flu Trends appears to be the first public project that uses the powerful database of a search engine to track the emergence of a disease
“This seems like a really 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,” said Thomas Malone, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management.
“I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence”
Samuel Widmann, Head of Maps, Google Switzerland, speaks during a presentation of the new Google feature 'Google Sky' at the planetarium in Hamburg, northern Germany, August 22, 2007 Popular mapping service Google Earth will launch a new feature called Sky, a "virtual telescope" which enables users to float and zoom in on over 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies, that the search engine hopes will turn millions of Internet users into stargazers

Google search engine flags flu activity in U.S
Maggie Fox, Reuters
Published: Tuesday, November 11, 2008
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/n...5-de9528cd844e

WASHINGTON (Reuters Life!) - Search engine giant Google launched a new tool Tuesday that will help U.S.
federal health experts track the annual flu epidemic
Google Flu Trends uses search terms that people put into the Web-based search engine to figure out where influenza is heating up, and notify the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time
"We've discovered that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity," Google said in a statement
"What this does is it takes Google search terms of influenza-like illness and influenza and it emulates a signal that tells us how much influenza activity there was," Dr.
Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at the CDC, said in a telephone interview

Studies indicate that between 35 and 40 percent of all visits to the Internet are begun by people looking for health information.
When people are sick, they tend to look up their symptoms
Google is keeping the search terms it uses private, but influenza-like illnesses include symptoms such as fever, muscle aches and cough.
Sneezing usually occurs with other viruses such as rhinoviruses
Currently, the CDC relies on centers that report on people coming to their doctors with flu-like symptoms, and lab tests that confirm whether a patient has influenza But many people with flu never visit a doctor and most doctors treat based on symptoms, rarely giving a flu test
Either way, the CDC's surveillance data is about two weeks behind
The Google tool will track flu activity in near real time, the company said

EARLY WARNING
"One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data," Finelli said
"The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used ... as early warning signal for flu activity"
Then the CDC can get the word out to hospitals, clinics and doctors offices so they can stock up on flu tests, antiviral drugs and antibiotics for people who get what are known as co-infections - bacterial infections that worsen a bout of flu
Two weeks warning also allows people to get vaccinated before flu reaches their community

Google is not charging for the service.
"They are giving it to the world for free," Finelli said
Google said it would keep individual user data confidential.
"Google Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week," the company said
"We rely on millions of search queries issued to Google over time, and the patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users"
Influenza kills an estimated 36,000 people a year in the United States and 250,000-500,000 globally
Experts are keen to track flu activity in case of a pandemic - a global epidemic of a new and deadly strain of flu that could kill millions within a few months

View Poll Results: have you or someone you know been sick with the flu recently?
YES	1	25.00%
NO	3	75.00%
Voters: 4. You may not vote on this poll

11-12-2008, 04:13 AM	#1
MAP Avalon Senior Member Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: click sing along with me =) ---> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn0bgdsCxXE Posts: 215	Google To Assist Feds During A Flu Pandemic Terror Google Flu Trends Site http://www.google.org/flutrends/ SICK SURVEILLANCE: GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS Drudge Report Tue Nov 11 2008 http://www.drudgereport.com/flashgof.htm GOOGLE will launch a new tool that will help federal officials "track sickness" "Flu Trends" uses search terms that people put into the web giant to figure out where influenza is heating up, and will notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time! GOOGLE, continuing to work closely with government, claims it would keep individual user data confidential: "GOOGLE FLU TRENDS can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week" Engineers will capture keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and others Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at CDC: "One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data. The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used... as early warning signal for flu activity" Thomas Malone, professor at M.I.T. "I think we are just scratching the surface of what's possible with collective intelligence" Eric Schmidt, GOOGLE's chief executive vows: "From a technological perspective, it is the beginning" Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread New York Times By MIGUEL HELFT Published: November 11, 2008 SAN FRANCISCO — There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctor That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks called Google Flu Trends Tests of the new Web tool from Google. org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention In early February, for example, the C.D.C. reported that the flu had recently spiked in the mid-Atlantic states. But Google says its search data show a spike in queries about flu symptoms two weeks before that report came out Its new service at google. org/flutrends analyzes those searches as they come in, creating graphs and maps of the country that, ideally, will show where the flu is spreading. Some public health experts say the data could help accelerate the response of doctors, hospitals and public health officials to a nasty flu season, reducing the spread of the disease and, potentially, saving lives “The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, and this could prevent cases of influenza,” said Lyn Finelli, lead for surveillance at the influenza division of the C.D.C. Between 5 and 20 percent of the nation’s population contracts the flu each year, she said, leading to an average of roughly 36,000 deaths For now the service covers only the United States, but Google is hoping to eventually use the same technique to help track influenza and other diseases worldwide “From a technological perspective, it is the beginning,” said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive The premise behind Google Flu Trends — what appears to be a fruitful marriage of mob behavior and medicine — has been validated by an unrelated study indicating that the data collected by Yahoo, Google’s main rival in Internet search, can also help with early detection of the flu “In theory, we could use this stream of information to learn about other disease trends as well,” said Philip M. Polgreen, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa and a co-author of the study based on Yahoo’s data Still, some public health officials note that many health departments already use other approaches, like gathering data from visits to emergency rooms, to keep daily tabs on disease trends in their own communities “We don’t have any evidence that this is more timely than our emergency room data,” said Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene If Google provided health officials with details of the system’s workings so that it could be validated scientifically, the data could serve as an additional way to detect influenza that was free and might prove valuable, said Dr. Mostashari, who is also chairman of the International Society for Disease Surveillance A paper on the methodology behind Flu Trends is expected to be published in a future issue of the journal Nature Researchers have long said that the material people publish on the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that can be used to spot trends and make predictions But the data collected by search engines is particularly powerful, because the keywords and phrases that people type into search engines represent their most immediate intentions. People may search for “Kauai hotel” when they are planning a vacation and for “foreclosure” when they get in trouble with their mortgage. Those queries express the world’s collective desires and needs, its wants and likes Internal research at Yahoo suggests that increases in searches for certain terms can help forecast what technology products will be hits, for instance. Yahoo itself has begun using search traffic to help it decide what material to feature on its site Two years ago, Google began opening its search data trove through Google Trends, a tool that allows anyone to track the relative popularity of search terms. Google also offers more sophisticated search traffic tools that marketers can use to fine-tune advertising campaigns. And internally it has tested the use of search data to reach conclusions about economic, marketing and entertainment trends “Most forecasting is basically trend extrapolation,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. “This works remarkably well, but tends to miss turning points, times when the data changes direction. Our hope is that Google data might help with this problem” Prabhakar Raghavan, who is in charge of Yahoo Labs and the company’s search strategy, also said search data could be valuable for forecasters and scientists, but concerns about privacy had generally stopped the company from sharing it with outside academics Google Flu Trends gets around privacy pitfalls by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be traced back to individual searchers. To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped the data onto the C.D.C.’s reports of “influenza-like illness,” which the agency compiles based on data from labs, health care providers, death certificates and other sources. Google found an almost perfect correlation between its data and the C.D.C. reports “We know it matches very, very well in the way flu developed in the last year,” said Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google. org Dr. Finelli of the C.D.C. and Mr. Brilliant both cautioned that the data needed to be monitored to ensure that the correlation with flu activity remained valid Other people have tried to use information collected from Internet users for public health purposes A Web site called whoissick. org, for instance, invites people to report about what ails them and superimposes the results on a map. But the site has received relatively little traffic, so its usefulness is limited HealthMap, a project affiliated with Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, scours the Web for news articles, blog posts and electronic newsletters to create a map that tracks emerging infectious diseases around the world It is backed by Google. org, which counts the detection and prevention of diseases as one of its main philanthropic objectives But Google Flu Trends appears to be the first public project that uses the powerful database of a search engine to track the emergence of a disease “This seems like a really 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,” said Thomas Malone, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence” Samuel Widmann, Head of Maps, Google Switzerland, speaks during a presentation of the new Google feature 'Google Sky' at the planetarium in Hamburg, northern Germany, August 22, 2007 Popular mapping service Google Earth will launch a new feature called Sky, a "virtual telescope" which enables users to float and zoom in on over 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies, that the search engine hopes will turn millions of Internet users into stargazers Google search engine flags flu activity in U.S Maggie Fox, Reuters Published: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/n...5-de9528cd844e WASHINGTON (Reuters Life!) - Search engine giant Google launched a new tool Tuesday that will help U.S. federal health experts track the annual flu epidemic Google Flu Trends uses search terms that people put into the Web-based search engine to figure out where influenza is heating up, and notify the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time "We've discovered that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity," Google said in a statement "What this does is it takes Google search terms of influenza-like illness and influenza and it emulates a signal that tells us how much influenza activity there was," Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at the CDC, said in a telephone interview Studies indicate that between 35 and 40 percent of all visits to the Internet are begun by people looking for health information. When people are sick, they tend to look up their symptoms Google is keeping the search terms it uses private, but influenza-like illnesses include symptoms such as fever, muscle aches and cough. Sneezing usually occurs with other viruses such as rhinoviruses Currently, the CDC relies on centers that report on people coming to their doctors with flu-like symptoms, and lab tests that confirm whether a patient has influenza But many people with flu never visit a doctor and most doctors treat based on symptoms, rarely giving a flu test Either way, the CDC's surveillance data is about two weeks behind The Google tool will track flu activity in near real time, the company said EARLY WARNING "One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data," Finelli said "The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used ... as early warning signal for flu activity" Then the CDC can get the word out to hospitals, clinics and doctors offices so they can stock up on flu tests, antiviral drugs and antibiotics for people who get what are known as co-infections - bacterial infections that worsen a bout of flu Two weeks warning also allows people to get vaccinated before flu reaches their community Google is not charging for the service. "They are giving it to the world for free," Finelli said Google said it would keep individual user data confidential. "Google Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week," the company said "We rely on millions of search queries issued to Google over time, and the patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users" Influenza kills an estimated 36,000 people a year in the United States and 250,000-500,000 globally Experts are keen to track flu activity in case of a pandemic - a global epidemic of a new and deadly strain of flu that could kill millions within a few months Last edited by MAP; 11-12-2008 at 04:20 AM.