So this morning I read about a new Google site tracking flu cases with fascination. Google has studied the volume of searches for flu-related terms like “fever” or “flu”. Over five years they tracked it against CDC reported cases of the flu and found that the searches are actually an excellent leading indicator (since CDC reports lag real time by weeks). Now you can go to a new page and get a look at current trends for the US as a whole or for your state or region.  Here’s a graph showing the correlation between searches and flu cases:

Google's Graph Comparing Search Activity to CDC Flu Cases

Kind of cool, I thought. My version of this image is a bit low-res; you can see a better version and get the whole explanation of how it works by going to Google’s explanatory page.