As we all know Google has been working on project "Flu Trends" if we may call it in which they were monitoring flu related searches on Google. Through experience they have managed to achieve a high level of accuracy in identifying the true flu activity in a country.
All this while Google Flu Trends was available in the United States. One of the most important aspects of Google Flu Trends is that they filter out terms that may be popular because people hear about them in the news or read about them in newspaper but these may not be the people who actually have flu symptoms. So in the recent outbreak of Swine flu, they do not use in their models terms like "swine flu" since people are more likely to type that into Google because they want to know more information about it.
Since the model has fair level of accuracy, Google has announced the expansion of Google Flu Trends to 16 additional countries and is now available in 37 languages. So Google Flu Trends is now available for Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United States
In November 2008 Google Flu Trends was launched in the United States after finding a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. This was achieved by tracking the popularity of certain Google search queries which now successfully estimates the level of flu in near real-time.
For more information you may watch following video:
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