Google.org is the philanthropic arm of Google, Inc. By investing 1% of Google’s equity and profits, Google.org supports both non-profit and for-profit endeavors. Google.org investments have included supporting the development of renewable energy technologies and medical research by providing targeted grants.
Investments fit under the umbrella of five initiatives: RE<C - focusing on renewable energy as a substitute for coal.
RechargeIT - focusing on accelerating the mass commercialization of plug-in vehicles.
Predict & Prevent - uses information and technology to empower communities to predict and prevent emerging threats before they become local, regional, or global crises.
Inform & Empower - focuses on providing meaningful, easily accessible information to citizens and communities, service providers, and policymakers in developing countries.
SMEs - focusing on lowering transaction costs, deepening capital markets to increase liquidity, and catalyzing capital for investment to aid in the success of small and medium-sized enterprises in developing countries.
As of September 2008, Google.org has committed over $100 million in grants and investments.
| Website | google.org/flutrends |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | November 11, 2008 |
Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?
Google 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. They compared their query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often they see these search queries, they can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.
During the 2007-2008 flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share results each week with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at CDC. Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, they were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports.
