Your data on Google
Helping society
Some of the things we learn from how people search can be useful for communities all over the world.
Disease
Imagine that somewhere in a remote place a man goes to Google and types in [fever]. Seconds later somebody nearby searches for [muscle ache]. And when more and more people from the same region start doing a similar search, it’s likely that something’s up.
Sometimes general patterns of search behavior match up closely to things happening in the offline world. When those correlations are strong, it can be possible to use spikes in a particular search to understand real-world behavior more quickly than traditional methods can notice a change. Using the aggregated searches of millions of people, we can help spot flu outbreaks or changes in economic conditions, giving professionals more time—and better information—to make decisions.
In 2008, we found that some search terms are good indicators of actual flu activity. It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take between one and two weeks to collect and release surveillance data. But Google search queries can be counted automatically very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends can provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza. We have used the same insight to look at patterns of other diseases and have created an early warning system for dengue fever.
It’s important to remember that Google Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week. We rely on millions of search queries over time, and the patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users.
Economics
By studying the way people search, we can also pick up on other important trends, like changes in the economic climate. For example, the Bank of England tracks search trends related to consumer behavior in the United Kingdom. By watching out for changes in demand for goods, mortgages and concerns about inflation, the Bank hopes to improve the speed of economic reporting and the responsiveness of fiscal decision making.
Google Correlate
Because we believe there are so many things that can be learned from aggregated search activities, we’ve introduced Google Correlate. This allows researchers to upload their own data series and see a list of search terms whose popularity best corresponds with real-world trends.
It’s good to know how search data can enable us to help society. Read the next theme: How you can manage your data online