Google Flu Trends Misrepresented the Severity of This Year's Flu Season [Infographic]
Google's Flu Trends, mapped Katie PeekA cautionary tale about the limitations of big data Last year, we wrote about Flu Trends, Google's search engine-based influenza barometer. The takeaway: after calibrating its results against the numbers from the Centers for Disease Control--which are based on emergency-room visits--Google did a pretty good job of predicting a flu outbreak, and did so quickly, without having to wait for all those hospital reports to reach the CDC and be compiled into a weekly report. But how did Google's algorithm fare during this year's fierce outbreak? Flu reached epidemic levels in January and--pertinent for the Flu Trends algorithm--was widely covered in the news. Would the widespread news coverage cause healthy people to enter influenza keywords into their search bars, thereby skewing Google's results? We updated our graphic from last year to find out. Indeed, Google's methods seem to wildly overstate the outbreak's severity, outstripping the...