By: Alanna Shaikh

Google has a new tool, . It’s based on Google Flu Trends, and it is intended to help public health authorities stay on top of Dengue outbreaks. It’s pretty much exactly the same as Google Flu Trends: Google has found that certain search terms tend to indicate a dengue outbreak.

The Dengue Trends tool describes itself this way:

We have also found a close relationship between how many people search for dengue-related topics and how many people actually have dengue symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “dengue” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the dengue-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional dengue surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when dengue season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much dengue is circulating in different countries and regions around the world.