Have you gotten your flu shot yet?

Google recently launched their Google Flu Trends site that takes keyword searches and helps estimate when the flu is coming to your neighborhood.

Their about page is pretty well done showing how 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.)

They found a 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 sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. They compared their data with 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 these search happen, they can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

According to Google's data, December is historically the worst flu month, so this is an apt time for Google Flu Trends to launch. Google is hoping that the tracker will be quicker and more accurate than the traditional method of waiting for doctors to report the flu, and they estimate that people are likely to Google the flu 1 to 2 weeks before they tell their doctors about it.

If you're in Tennessee like I am, you'll want to see this slide: