Google Trends: A Web‐Based Tool for Real‐Time Surveillance of Disease Outbreaks

Abstract

Google Flu Trends can detect regional outbreaks of influenza 7-10 days before conventional Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveillance systems. We describe the Google Trends tool, explain how the data are processed, present examples, and discuss its strengths and limitations. Google Trends shows great promise as a timely, robust, and sensitive surveillance system. It is best used for surveillance of epidemics and diseases with high prevalences and is currently better suited to track disease activity in developed countries, because to be most effective, it requires large populations of Web search users. Spikes in search volume are currently hard to interpret but have the benefit of increasing vigilance. Google should work with public health care practitioners to develop specialized tools, using Google Flu Trends as a blueprint, to track infectious diseases. Suitable Web search query proxies for diseases need to be established for specialized tools or syndromic surveillance. This unique and innovative technology takes us one step closer to true real-time outbreak surveillance.

Characteristics of Bitcoin users: an analysis of Google search data

“…8 GT data have © been predictive of behaviour in diverse economic markets including entertainment, labour © and housing (Askitas and Zimmerman, 2009;Varian and Choi, 2009;Hand and Judge, 2012;Wu and Brynjolfsson, 2013). It has also been used for detecting health patterns, including influenza outbreaks and Lyme disease cycles (Ginsberg et al, 2009;Carneiro and Mylonakis, 2009;Seifter et al, 2010). 9 He shows that cross-sectional state variation in GT is highly correlated with other data sources; for example the search rate for the word 'God' explains 65% of the variation in the percentage of a state's residents believing in God.…”

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“…When appropriately trained, these methods can be quite accurate; for example, many of the cited models can produce near real-time estimates of case counts with correlations upwards of r = 0.95. The collection of disease surveillance work cited above has estimated incidence for a wide variety of infectious and noninfectious conditions: avian influenza [52], cancer [55], chicken pox [67], cholera [81], dengue [50,53,84], dysentery [76], gastroenteritis [56,61,67], gonorrhea [64], hand foot and mouth disease (HFMD) [72], HIV/AIDS [75,76], influenza [34,36,54,57,59,62,63,65,67,68,71,74,[77][78][79][80]82,83,[85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93], kidney stones [51], listeriosis [70], malaria [66], methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) [58]<...>…”

“…Openness. Deep access to search queries from Baidu, a Chinese-language search engine serving mostly the Chinese market (http://www.baidu.com) [64,74,76]; Google [36,[50][51][52][53][54][56][57][58][59][60][65][66][67][69][70][71][72][73]75]; Yahoo [55,68]; and Yandex, a search engine serving mostly Russia and Slavic countries in Russian (http://www.yandex.ru), English (http://www. yandex.com), and Turkish (http://www.yandex.com.tr) [75], as well as purpose-built health website search queries [61][62][63] and access logs [72,93] are available only to those within the organizations, upon payment of an often-substantial fee, or by some other special arrangement.…”

The Pros and Cons of Sick Pay Schemes: Testing for Contagious Presenteeism and Shirking Behavior

“…The basic idea is that Google search queries can be used to predict and replicate actual influenza infection rates. It has been shown that Google Flu Trends accurately estimates weekly influenza activity in each region of the U.S. (Carneiro and Mylonakis 2009;Ginsberg et al 2009). 21 We use two main Google Flu Trends samples.…”