You can Google to get a hotel, find a flight and buy a book. Now you may be able to use Google to avoid the flu.
One month into flu season, Google Inc. on Tuesday opened a free Web service that the Internet company says can show if the number of influenza cases is increasing in areas around the U.S., earlier than many existing methods.
The service, called Flu Trends (www.google.org/flutrends), uses computers to crunch millions of Internet searches people make for keywords that might be related to the flu -- for instance "cough," or "fever." It displays the results on a map of the U.S. and shows a chart of changes in flu activity around the country. The data is meaningful because the Google arm that created Flu Trends found a strong correlation between the number of Internet searches related to the flu and the number of people reporting flu symptoms.
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