Google Flu Trends to track the spread of flu.

Last week, Google introduced a new service called Google Flu Trends designed to predict faster and more accurately, flu outbreaks. The service developed in collaboration with the Center for Diseases Control or CDC, analyzes information gathered from flu related search terms. The key idea here is that the more people in a certain geographical region are searching Google for flu related terms such as coughs, fever, headache, runny noise etc, the more likely there will be a flu outbreak in that area. The CDC is helping validate and refine the model and is providing data over a five year period. The new system is said to be capable of predicting flu outbreaks in a particular area up to two weeks faster than traditional methods.

For more, see Bloomberg.com