Official Google Canada Blog: Alberta and Saskatchewan facing worst flu season in years according to Google Flu Trends

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Alberta and Saskatchewan facing worst flu season in years according to Google Flu Trends

Friday, January 3, 2014

Last year, it seemed like much of Canada was feeling a bit achey, sneezy and feverish as the country faced one of its worst flu seasons in recent years. Unfortunately, the diagnosis for 2014 isn’t looking much better - especially for residents of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Google Flu Trend analysis, based on aggregated search data, show flu activity is intensifying across Canada, with Flu-related searches in Alberta and Saskatchewan already outpacing last year’s peak.

Health Canada’s FluWatch reported that cases of influenza increased in December. And while the 2013-2014 flu season appears to have started a few weeks later than last year, the current trajectory of search activity suggests that more Canadians may soon be feeling under the weather.

About Google Flu Trends

In 2007, a small team of engineers began to explore ways of accurately modeling real-world phenomena using patterns in search queries. We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. Our results have been published in the journal Nature.

Flu Trends tracks and analyzes terms to provide estimates of flu activity in near real-time for 29 countries based on an analysis of large groups of certain search queries. Our estimates can be viewed on the Google Flu Trends website.

Posted by Aaron Brindle, Google Canada

Labels: Search Trends

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