Google announced on Tuesday that they are helping Atlanta-based US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to collect data on flu by using a Flu Trend Counter. What is does is that it will help to record someone uses Google to search for Flu related keywords.
Google found that the data collected has very close relationship with the numbers in CDC. According to Google, this is just the beginning. If this works out well, more diseases can be tracked.
With traditional methods, CDC will need to manually collect the data and the delivery of information will be slow. However, with the help of the big giant Gpogle, it can speed up the process of estimatiing the flu trend (or other diseases).