As an internet marketer, keyword research and analysis takes up a big portion of my day. I am constantly trying to find creative new ways to illustrate to clients that the keywords people enter into the search engines can tell us almost everything we need know about them – where are they in the buying cycle, what exactly about a product are they interested in, how much they are willing to spend, and more…

For those of you who need even further proof of the revealing nature of keywords look no further than Google.org’s Flu Trends project. Google realized that they could use their wealth of keyword data for the greater good by releasing search trends relating to flu keywords.

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

They don’t say which keywords they monitor for this project but I’m sure it includes ones like “flu symptoms,” “headaches,” “fever,” etc. Check out a Google Trends search I ran for “flu symptoms.” You can see that the trends look very similar to their Flu Trends reports.
Google Flu Trends is remarkably accurate when compared to the CDC’s reports. The big difference is that Google’s reports are practically real-time whereas the CDC is 2 weeks or more delayed. I would also imagine that producing this is costing Google much less than it costs the CDC, being that they are using data that is already collected.

It will be interesting to see how seriously this innovation will be taken by the medical community. If Google decides to release more in-depth information then we could start to determine exactly what symptoms are affecting the public and the severity of these symptoms – FYI, this is already possible using Google’s Adwords Tool if you have the time and the knowhow. I am also curious to see where else they will take this concept. People search Google for every topic imaginable and useful trends can be released in any number of areas – presidential public approval, stock market activity, awareness of issues, etc.

AC/DC released a new music video this week on their website. This is no ordinary video, this is spreadsheet ASCII Art!

I know, spreadsheets aren’t typically mentioned in the same sentence as sex, drugs, and rock&roll (and neither has AC/DC for about 15 years), but this is worth checking out. Download the excel file here or if you’re feeling lazy just watch the youtube video below.

The internets is ripe for mashing up different technologies and this is a great example of how, these days, a new artform can be created overnight. Not to say they’re all going to have staying power, but they are worth noting. Surprisingly, this video has created a moderate buzz in the viral video-sphere, with about 160k views on Youtube as of writing, 3 days after they released the video. This seems like it would be the kind of video to gain slow and steady views from the interoffice email chain crowd.