Northwestern Social Networks 101
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GOOGLE uses YOUR searches to TRACK (AND PREDICT!!!) INFLUENZA A OUTBREAKS

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Post  KingTut Sun May 24, 2009 9:59 pm

http://www.google.org/flutrends/

It's simply brilliant.
GOOGLE:

We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.

The CDC can report an outbreak accurately 2 WEEKS after Google aggregates the searches of people in an area SEARCHING for flu related terms on their engine.

This is related to the overall discussion on invasion of privacy, but on the flipside we can see why deal with outbreaks so much faster using this system. This is also a good reflection on spread of disease models that we discussed earlier in class

KingTut

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Join date : 2009-04-11

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Post  KingTut Sun May 24, 2009 10:19 pm

I also wanted to make a related post topic - this being an extremely interesting application of most of the major topics discussed in class.

This is an excerpt of a NYTimes article talking about the google flu trends:

But the data collected by search engines is particularly powerful, because the keywords and phrases that people type into them represent their most immediate intentions. People may search for “Kauai hotel” when they are planning a vacation and for “foreclosure” when they have trouble with their mortgage. Those queries express the world’s collective desires and needs, its wants and likes.

This is a perfect exemplar of the "collective intelligence" concept where though the noise, the variability, bias, localised/specialised knowledge, people in the aggregate reflect a correct response. Presumably, if we tracked the amount of times "forclosure" was typed in a google search, we would find a potentially accurate rate of increase of forclosure months before the US Labor Dept. releases their quarterly reports. Who knows>? Maybe the forclosure number is greater in real life than the Labor dept and Federal Reserve suggest due to how slowly these numbers percolate through agencies.

KingTut

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