Hypochondriacs rejoice! Google has released ‘Google Flu Trends,’ a service that tracks search queries involving the term ‘flu.’ It is an extension of the ‘trends‘ service that actually anticipates each state’s flu search frenzy, a methodology that doesn’t actually display the # of victims, but the eagerness to examine the term.
The system therefore will be of use to pharmaceutical advertisers not just to anticipate a ‘season,’ but to examine their dollar effect on the people, or the American as analyzed by the Google zeitgeist.