Ok, I wouldn’t have picked this one as Google’s latest online offering.

Google Flu Trends is not a revelation in concept, however it certainly does show the power of the collective data of the world’s most dominant web search engine,

Google Flu Trends works by monitoring individual searches made by potentially flu-ridden folk. Google started by identifying a likely set of search terms that were typical of those infected with the influenza. The individual searches are tracked by their physical location, and then aggregated to show which states in the U.S. currently have the highest rates of flu searches on Google, and which states are trending towards or away from epidemics. Of course, it’s not a fail-safe measure of flu infection (I’ve Googled ‘flu’ before just to get an image of a snotty-face little kid for a hapless Powerpoint presentation), but it does offer at the very least, a vague indication of flu out-breaks.

Google Flu Trends is probably a conceptual analytical project Google developed to illustrate the power of Google Trends and geographical web analytics data. But it really does get you thinking doesn’t it – Big Brother Google is always watching.

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