Google has announced the availability of Google dengue trends for India. These trends are also available for Brazil,Indonesia and Singapore. These trends can be accessed at
http://www.google.org/denguetrends. The Internet has become the first source of information for health related searches. Google uses this search activity to estimate, in almost real-time, the extent of dengue outbreak in a particular geography. It then correlates this data with historic baseline dengue activity in the area to report the activity level as Minimal, Low, Moderate, High, or Intense. These are then plotted as color codes geographically on a map.
According to Google, there is a close relationship between the searches on dengue related symptoms and the number of people who actually have dengue. Depending on the frequency of such search queries, Google estimates the extent of the outbreak of this disease. Google has tested a similar model for estimating the outbreak of flu in the UnitedStates.