Quality and Innovation

Is the flu spreading across your state? You can find out using Google Flu Trends, which projects the spread of influenza based on how people are using Google to search for health information. Check out the movie illustrating how search data appears to correlate with flu data from the Center for Disease Control.

The reason this interests me is that Google is using a tracer – examining search patterns in terms of where the searches are originating from geographically to infer how diseases might be spreading. They are not tracking diagnosis information or other “hard” data which would affirm the presence of disease, only recognizing that people will tend to be more interested in the flu when they’re trying to figure out whether they have it! (The most useful aspect of the search data is that it appears to serve as a leading indicator for the CDC data, which has a two week lag.)

Are any companies out there using patterns in their Google searches on their websites to infer what consumers or constituents are most interested in at any given time? It would be interesting to see what other “real” things Google search data can serve as a leading indicator for. I could see this as a useful technique for diagnosing the “voice of the customer” in a novel way.