Google has launched Flu Trends, a tracking application for the influenza virus.

The 'flu is responsible for half a million deaths worldwide every year, according to Google, and by assessing the number of searches related to influenza on a daily basis Google can quickly spot early warning signs of an outbreak.

"Our up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and — though we hope never to find out — pandemics," Google said in a blog posting.

However, the information is being collated in the US only, though Google hinted that it could roll out Flu Trends in the UK.

A Google spokeswoman told Web User that it was "hoping to explore other countries, languages, and diseases in the future".

The company also insisted that the use of search data in this way was still respectful of individuals' privacy.

"Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymised, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week. The patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users," Google said.

www.google.org/flutrends

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