All this is interesting, but there’s more useful data in there waiting to be uncovered. Someone at Google put together a list of search terms that might be entered by someone with the flu, extracted a few years of search data, correlated that with the CDC’s disease data, and created Google Flu Trends. The idea is that when flu season hits and people start getting sick, they’ll start hunting for information and advice online. This will get noticed by Google and can provide useful data on where the flu seems to be hitting hardest. Additionally, since most people are likely to go online before they call their doctor or go to the hospital, trends might become apparent earlier through search data than through more traditional methods.

All in all, it’s a very clever way to take information which otherwise might get ignored, or used for a purely business-related purpose, and use it in a way that could help people. Get the backstory in this article at the New York Times.