Serious: a Google data scientist has legitimately written a book on this topic lol. Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (see his Wikipedia page)
The book didn’t age super well because they got the causation direction wrong; in terms of real-world implementation Google Trends turned out to be pretty bad at actually predicting flu
Google Trends turned out to be pretty bad at actually predicting flu
did anyone claim it tried to predict anything? foreseeing the future is indeed hard, but catching something once it happens as fast as possible is different story.
Serious: a Google data scientist has legitimately written a book on this topic lol. Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (see his Wikipedia page)
The book didn’t age super well because they got the causation direction wrong; in terms of real-world implementation Google Trends turned out to be pretty bad at actually predicting flu
did anyone claim it tried to predict anything? foreseeing the future is indeed hard, but catching something once it happens as fast as possible is different story.