Using Google to track swine flu fears

Using Google to track swine flu fears Celeste Biever, biomedical news Swine flu(H1N1) has dominated the headlines (ours included) for the last 10 days. Now that the virus seems less nasty than initially feared, the appetite of the public and media for other issues has returned. But how did our interest in swine flu compare with our interest in other scary health threats, such as bird flu in 2005, or with slow burn issues like cancer? And how does it compare with other big news stories?To get some idea, we asked Google Trends, a tool that lets you explore the number of searches that have been made for certain terms, relative to the total number of searches.The conclusion? While the swine flu outbreak has motivated large numbers of web users, Barack Obama is still more popular.
Searches for swine flu in recent days massively outnumber those for bird flus for bird flu's other popular names - avian flu and H5N1 - doesn't make a total anywhere near that for swine flu Swine flu also beats interest in the Bernard Madoff scandal, which peaked at the end of 2008 .And although interest in cancer is high and steady, it can't approach swine flu.To find a cultural event that generated more web searches you have to look to Barack Obama at the time of his election in 2008 and inauguration in January .Such comparisons provide a neat way to visualise and measure what people are really thinking about. But Google's data has useful applications as well. Last year researchers at the firm showed that search trends can acurately predict the number of flu cases in a country, they might even predict future economic activity too. Google has already started trying to track the spread swine flu in Mexico using its trends tool - should the World Health Organization be using the same method? Source: Scientist News Be Sure to Leave Your Comments!