They are not doing this anymore [0] and I assume there is a reason for that.
UDPATE: Here is the reason: "And then, GFT failed—and failed spectacularly—missing at the peak of the 2013 flu season by 140 percent. When Google quietly euthanized the program, called Google Flu Trends (GFT), it turned the poster child of big data into the poster child of the foibles of big data. " [1]
Maybe that people look up all kinds of things not related to themselves. For example, read an article and it mentions some illness you have not heard of, you double tap the illness in question and right-click and search for that. Things like that will skew results. Heck, if google based my health upon what I've googled over the years then they would of had me flagged as dead many times over.
As well they say they are working with universities on that. Basically, they are doing something most probably, but not necessary have something valuable.
> missing at the peak of the 2013 flu season by 140 percent.
Can someone decode what this actually means? Was their estimate of flu cases 140 percent higher or lower than the actual amount (or maybe lazily meant "at 140 percent", so, estimate was 40 percent low), was the peak offset by 1.4 months (or 14 months??), something else?