Google is sometimes called "evil" by its critics. Often this has to do with advertising or privacy concerns, but critics might want to consider the notion that Google's efforts might potentially prevent the spread of plague and dare I even say the apocalypse. A bit of a stretch? Maybe, but watch this video from Google.org, and you will get a sense of where I'm going with this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XxrZAgIgMMThe latest project related to saving the world, is Official Google Blog:
Our team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season each year. We compared these aggregated queries against data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we found that there's a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week. As a result, if we tally each day's flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness. Based on this discovery, we have launched Google Flu Trends, where you can find up-to-date influenza-related activity estimates for each of the 50 states in the U.S. The CDC does a great job of surveying real doctors and patients to accurately track the flu, so why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.Google's
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