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The earlier that public health interventions can be implemented, the greater the likelihood that such interventions will be effective in preventing or controlling an epidemic. But how quickly can an epidemic be recognized? Investigators at the CDC and Google, Inc., hypothesized that a rapid way to identify influenza activity in the U.S. would be to track Internet search engine queries related to the disease.
The researchers created a weekly count for 50 million of the most common Google search queries between 2003 and 2008 in a database that excludes user identifier information but incorporates general physical location based on the Internet protocol address. They then used algorithms to select the queries that most accurately modeled the pe…