Google Flu Trends Gets Data Makeover

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Flu Trends will be adding CDC flu data in an effort to improve the accuracy of its predictions.

In 2009, Google Flu Trends predicted the severity of the H1N1 two weeks before official reports. Yet it has been criticized for being susceptible to overestimating flu outbreaks leading the recent decision to pair Google’s flu data with the data of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

According to iHealth Beat, the data collected by the CDC was found to be more accurate than that of Google Flu Trends by a study earlier this year. At the time, Google had just estimated double the cases of flu than actually occurred.

Business Insider reports Google claims the previous overestimations were caused by an increase in online searches about influenza – a result of news reports that prompted the public to search for information.

“For the 2014/2015 season, we’re launching a new Flu Trends model in the U.S. that – like many of the best performing methods in the literature – takes official CDC flu data into account as the flu season progresses,” explains Christian Stefansen, Senior Software Engineer at Google. “We’ll publish the details in a technical paper soon. We look forward to seeing how the new model performs in 2014/2015 and whether this method could be extended to other countries.”

“As we’ve said since 2009, "This system is not designed to be a replacement for traditional surveillance networks or supplant the need for laboratory-based diagnoses and surveillance." But we do hope it can help alert health professionals to outbreaks early, and in areas without traditional monitoring, and give us all better odds against the flu,” says Stefansen.

The new and improved Google Flu Trends will be able to distinguish the difference between people who are searching for information out of curiosity and those who are searching out of concern they have contracted the flu.