Google Can Help Keep You Healthy

This is amazing and fascinating. Google has created a site that tracks incidence of the flu across the country based on the number of Google searches. So if a lot of people in Indiana are looking up information on the flu, the site assumes that's a good indication that Indiana has a lot of flu cases. It turns out, at least from the explantory page, that that is a good assumption. That page shows a comparison of Center for Disease Control data and Google flu-related searches and there s a clear similarity. In addition, the Google graph is faster in showing the incidence of flu by about two weeks! Amazing! The aggregate power of the information is looking to transform, just completely transform the way we learn about and live in the world. Though, there are some things to maybe disturb me, like the wiki-ization of human health, along with everything else. Is it so smart for us to be so dependent on a total democratization of all knowledge? I don't think so. Still, I'll certainly be using this site.