Three Google tools have been released previously to enable
access to aggregated online web search query data. Google
Trends and Google Insights for Search are both real-time
systems which provide temporal and spatial activity for a
given query. However, they are both unable to automatically
surface queries which correspond with a particular pattern of
activity. Google Flu Trends provides estimates of Influenza-like
Illness (ILI) activity in the United States, using models based
on query data. These queries are selected from millions of
possible candidates through an automated process1
. Due to
the computational requirements of this process, a batchbased
distributed computing framework18 was employed to
distribute the task across hundreds of machines.