Tracking Influenza (flu) with Google Trends

This is quite an astonishing use of Google Trends.  Google realized that when people get sick they (obviously) search for flu related keywords and they managed to find a correlation to actual published flu infection statistics.  Quite amazing and this is definately a unique and interesting application of technology.

How we track flu trends (Google blog)
Here is an explanation of how it works

What other ideas can we apply this to?

Related Reading:

JavaScript: The Good Parts

Head First Java, 2nd Edition

Effective Java (2nd Edition)

Other Interesting Posts

• PHP VS. ASP.NET
• Creating SqlParameters Best Practices
• Creating Maintainable Database Queries In C# (with source code)