Google's Flu Trends closes public access

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google's Flu Trends model will no longer be publicly available, the company announced last week, though the data will still be available to institutions including Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Influenza Division. 

 

“Since its launch, Google Flu Trends has provided useful insights and served as one of the early examples for ‘nowcasting’ based on search trends, which is increasingly used in health, economics and other fields,” the team wrote in a blog post. “Instead of maintaining our own website going forward, we’re now going to empower institutions who specialize in infectious disease research to use the data to build their own models.”

 

The ability for “nowcasting” to effectively help manage the spread of communicable diseases like the flu is still in its early stages, the Google team noted.