

Google could have caught swine flu early - codemechanic
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/google-could-have-caught-swine-flu-early/

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jjs
Bad headline, Wired. Should read, " _detected_ swine flu", instead of "caught
swine flu".

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sounddust
It's obviously intentional word play, although I would agree if you thought it
wasn't very clever.

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dhughes
I was watching a show about a computer system that monitors the Internet and
other traditional media and shows what words and phrases (all languages) are
rising through the chatter. It could have been for the NSA or Wall Street, I
forget, but it's very interesting to see how all that supposedly random noise
can be sifted to show new trends.

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mahmud
Though not realtime, Google's own Zeitgeist and Trends do that. For anything
of that sort to be realtime it would have to do Deep Packet Inspection at
every ISP, or maybe just at a few _very_ fat pipes.

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jgrahamc
It would be nice to see some actual data rather than just that graph. If you
look at the graph your eye is drawn to the dramatic upswing in the 2009 line,
but is all of that upswing before media reports? It's unclear from the
presentation.

Also, if you look at the data from previous years there's also an upswing in a
similar timeframe.

What's needed is some concrete analysis of the data so that you can see if
there was a detectable deviation from the norm prior to media reports.
Unfortunately, Google has not released the historical data for Mexico (they've
released it for the US only).

