The New York Times reports that the high use of Google to find information about the flu has resulted in enough data to report trends faster than the CDC:

“This seems like a really clever way of using data that is created unintentionally by the users of Google to see patterns in the world that would otherwise be invisible,” said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence.”

Check out Google.org – what other useful information can we learn from Google use?

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