A genius at Google noticed you could map flu outbreaks quite early because of searches people do about flu symptoms and related terms. Here is the graph of flu activity so far for this year. Because of the swine flu, people are a bit more keyed up about flu and are search more, as shown in the graph. That’s one theory. Or, there is going to be a big outbreak. Are the searches based on symptoms, as the likely were in the past, or are they about fear because of the new strain?
