google trends

MPR’s “Challenged Ballots: You be the judge” post has got to be the site’s top traffic generator ever. I’ve seen it linked locally and nationally, on buttoned-up news sites and Comedy Central’s Indecision ‘08. That last one, which references the infamous contested write-in vote for “Lizard People” (destined to be our “Hanging Chad of Aught Eight”), ends with a few salient questions.

The story has itself gone viral: A new Google tool tracks the spread of actual influenza by monitoring Web searches for terms like “flu.” By aggregating such virtual searches, Google can also anticipate flu outbreaks in the real world by a week to 10 days. Even if Google were to amend its motto to “First, do no evil,” can we trust national health policy to the same search engine trend-spotting tool that puts a wrinkled comedian and a airbrushed model at an equal level of “Hotness”?