You said: “search volume on its own is predictive of future outcomes, but search is nevertheless often outperformed by baseline models trained on publicly available data; combining search and baseline models generally leads to modest improvements.”

I am curious to see if this continues to hold true as search evolves and tracking improves. We track trends for customers whose products are seasonal and even regional.

I wonder if search load would be a useful predictor given chief complaint data. Or the richer data feed that CDC’s now getting.

The problem I’ve seen discussed relative to using search for bio-surveillance is that if a celebrity gets sick, searches for whatever they have spike. That may not matter for forward prediction, or may itself be predictable given co-searches for the celebrity.