Serendipity35

A friend who reads this blog noticed that the biggest category is "trends." One way to track trends online is through the patterns in online search queries.

Google offers lots of ways to do that. The recent U.S. elections offer a good example. I admit to checking their hot trends.to see what is bubbling up today. And you can check their Zeitgeist for the year. (It's interesting that in 2007 the Presidential Campaign most searched-for peole were 1. ron paul, 2. fred thompson, 3. hillary clinton, 4. barack obama, 5. john edwards, 6. mitt romney, 7. john mccain, 8. joe biden, 9. bill richardson, 10. rudy giuliani. The results are a combination of popularity and a lack of knowledge about a candidate)

Recently, they started to explore going beyond just trends and try to accurately model real-world phenomena using patterns in search queries. One result of that was that they met with public health experts on Google.org's Predict and Prevent team. ("Google.org aspires to use the power of information and technology to address the global challenges of our age: climate change, poverty and emerging disease.") They decided to look at influenza, commonly known as "the flu," which is responsible for up to 500,000 deaths worldwide each year and try to track flu trends.

Search queries about the flu are very common during flu season each year. If you (well, Google) compares these aggregated queries against data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and found that there's a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week. They further discovered that if they look at the total day's flu-related search queries, they can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness. So, they have launched Google Flu Trends, where you can find up-to-date influenza-related activity estimates for each of the 50 states in the U.S.

Want to make some data inferences - or have your students do so?  Take a look at Insights for Search and see what the world is searching for now. Guess what U.S. states had the most search queries on "pedagogy" in the past 12 months? What if you change that search to take in the world? (The U.S. comes up fifth.) I checked my employer, PCCC, and the top state for search queries is New Jersey (no surprise) but #2 is New Hampshire and #4 is Oregon. Hmmmm...