To the Editor: The idea that populations provide data on their in-fluenza status through information-seeking behavior on the Web has been explored in the United States in recent years (1,2). Two reports showed that queries to the Internet search engines Yahoo and Google could be informa-tive for influenza surveillance (2,3). Ginsberg et al. scanned the Google database and found that the sum of the results of 45 queries that most cor-related with influenza incidences pro-vided the best predictor of influenza trends (3). On the basis of trends of Google queries, these authors put their results into practice by creating a Web page dedicated to influenza surveil-lance. However, they did not develop the same approach for other diseases. To date, no studies have been pub-lished about the relationship of search engine query data with other diseases or in languages other than English
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