analyzing it takes time. so the cdc's picture of the crisis was always a week or two behind. which is an eternity when a pandemic is underway. around the same time, engineers at google developed an alternative way to predict the spread of the flu. not just nationally, but down to regions in the united states. they used google searches. now, google handles more than three billion searches a day and saves them all. google took 50 million of the most common-searched terms that americans use and compared when and where these terms were searched for with flu data going back five years. the idea was to predict the spread of the flu through web searches alone. they struck gold. what you're looking at right now is a graph, and the graph is showing that after crunching