Google Flu Trends hits Australia

Google has expanded Google Flu Trends, its online tool for tracking influenza outbreaks, to Australia and New Zealand. Google said it had built a flu model for the state of Victoria by working with its own search data and historical flu data from the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory. We then extrapolated this model to produce flu models at a national and state level for the rest of Australia, Google said in a blog post. Tasmania and Northern Territory were not included, Google said, because there was not a large enough volume of search queries to be accurate