After reading a New York Times article about Google, I think Google
could serve as an early warning system for infectious disease. In the article,
Google knew about an earthquake in Seattle almost immediately because of a spike
in earthquake related searches from the Seattle area. This is exactly what I
mean by a "sensory organ for the hive mind" People serve as little sensors and
can be counted on for plugging into the internet and reporting what they see,
taste, feel and hear. Google collects these reports without even
trying. For example, when Frank had pink-eye, I looked it up on
Google. Google kind of knows that pinkeye is the same thing as conjunctivitis
because it showed me information about both. The Google database that exists at Google headquarters REALLY knows that pinkeye is the same as conjunctivitis because it knows which links people click after searching for pinkeye and conjunctivitis and it knows that they go to the same sites for one. So the central cluster of computers at Google has this knowledge. People have struggled in the
past for a way to teach a computer that concepts like pinkeye and
conjunctivitis were related.
The same thing could be used to watch out for diseases like
smallpox, hantavirus, measles, any fast acting virus. One problem is that a
computer can't tell that the words virus, rash, fever, headache, flu, influenza
are all related. Misspellings and capitalization make it even more confusing But
Google itself can teach a computer that those words are related based on the
search results. So Google could collect these relationships and "know" what
words mean. It wouldn't be much harder to teach it the exact relationship between words that were not exactly equal. For example, relationships like "is one of" or "has many" or "lives near" or "owns" are within reach because Google knows that
smallpox, hantavirus, rabies and AIDS all share the word virus in the search results. The word "virus" on the other hand may be any number of things including a computer virus. So Google knows that rabies is a virus but a virus may or may not be rabies.
I wish I worked at Google. Google knows two kinds of things. In an interface
available to everyone, It knows the relevance of a certain collection of text to
a keyword or phrase. At headquarters, they know how many people are interested
in a certain search word, where they live, and what they clicked on to find out
more. This is a way to seed a pretty good artificial intelligence with meanings
and relationships otherwise unavailable to a computer. Google headquarters knows that it
snowed in Montana last night. It knows that someone's bike got stolen in
Minneapolis because someone blogged about it. Maybe it knows who stole it because someone else saw the crime happen and blogged about it. It knows my son was diagnosed with Pinkeye
on November 12 because I wrote about it. So there is a complex relationship between blogs, Google's index of links and Google's database of search phrases.
2:28:17 PM 
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