I don’t know about you, but I tend to self-diagnose. I’m not a hypochondriac (I have a relative who thinks every sore throat is menengitis), but the Internet has certainly made it very easy to type in my symptoms and get a list of possible conditions and treatments (and it’s cheaper than my co-pay).

But, does this make anyone else a little queasy?

SAN FRANCISCO - There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats. Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors.

That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks, called Google Flu Trends.

Read the whole story in the New York Times. And more from CNN.com:

Google knows that you might do something like that, and it also knows which U.S. state you’re in. Now, it’s putting that information together in a tool that Google says could detect flu outbreaks faster than traditional systems currently in use.

…

Google has also taken into account that people sometimes look for flu-related terms in response to certain news headlines and do not actually have the flu, Ginsberg said. The tool looks for terms that, for example, reflect searches by a person who has chest congestion or wants to buy a thermometer, he said.

…

Flu Trends cannot be used to identify individual users, the company statement said. The search engine relies on aggregated counts, made anonymous, of how often certain search terms occur each week. But every computer connected to the Internet has its own internet protocol address, or IP address, which reveals its location to Google.

The ability to preempt an epidemic and diagnose a population before an outbreak is pretty incredible, though it certainly begs the question of how anonymous and temporarily-stored is this data really?

My stomach hurts a little now. Wonder what it might be. Maybe I’ll just call my doctor.

UPDATE - The New York Times looks at possible privacy risks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 3:39 pm and is filed under NewsBlog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.