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Published online 19 November 2008 | Nature 456, 287-288 (2008) | doi:10.1038/456287a
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Web data predict flu
Search engines provide information about epidemics.
Two new studies hint at the public-health and research potential of mining the data created as people search the web. Both teams have successfully detected the onset of US seasonal flu epidemics, by extracting patterns of flu-related search terms from the billions of queries stored by Google and Yahoo.
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Scary stuff - an eye into the mind of the nation. I wonder if you can predict (or at least postdict) election results with this type of analysis, say from the relative frequencies of 'democrat' vs 'republican' or 'obama' vs 'mccain'.