I was therefore quite intrigued when I recently came across Google Insights for Search when reading about the swine flu. Google has used search data to map out flu trends in the States and now also in Mexico. The results have been  encouraging and indicates that it is possible to use Google data as an early warning system for all sorts of things.

As a result of Google’s position as the world’s number one search engine, whenever people want to know more about something, they go to Google and do a search. So if you get unwell and need to know more about what to do about the flu or whatever illness you think you may have, you search for more information about the illness. If only you do it, it is not so significant, but when hundreds start doing it in a little village in Mexico, it starts getting interesting.

This is what makes Insights for Search such an intriguing tool. The service can be useful for all kinds of research, but let’s just look at a couple of examples to give you an idea. Terrorism vs global warming vs bird flu? Seems global warming has the upper edge for now, though all have been top of the list at times.

Breakfast and lunch? Seems August is the high-season for breakfast and December is the high-season for dinner. Not sure what makes August so popular for breakfast, so that will require some further research. Comments welcome!

iPhone? Seems to be waning in popularity, so let’s see what Apple comes up with.

Of course there will be cultural biases, noise and randomness in this data, but a very usable tool allowing everyone to easily datamine some of Google’s massive search data. Next time you are going on vacation abroad, remember to check the Google flu result first

Is it too late to come to the party? It depends, on one side you have the long tail in action (read more about the long tail), where there is always someone who thinks your application is perfect. Your application with origami flower diagrams might fit the bill perfectly for 0.01% of the iPhone users (probably an optimistic estimate but you never know). Out of an estimated 20 million iPhones, that makes for around 2000 downloads, so it could at least pay for that nice new iMac. On the other hand, make something people find useful and/or entertaining, and you could look at some very nice returns on your effort. For now, I see it as mostly for fun.

From a commercial perspective, the iPhone platform is one of the most interesting platforms to develop for at the moment. I’ve looked at several others, including Skype, Facebook and Microsoft Live, but the iPhone offers the most promising opportunities at the moment. The number of applications sold through the app store is closing a billion, and the number of phones is probably around 20 million now. iPhone owners are probably a little bit more technical than other phone users, and also a likely to spend a bit more, as the phone already is a premium product compared to other phones. This, combined with the technical capabilities of the phone, makes for some exciting late nights this spring.

Anyway, I’ve enrolled in the iPhone development program. That happened two days ago, but still waiting for some news from Apple. Based on another user’s experience, it took 18 days to have the enrollment approved, so seems I will need to prepare myself for a wait. In the mean time I’m learning Objective-C (the Apple programming language) and Xcode (the Apple development environment).

A common feature of the Norwegian paper is the language-fluent copy-cat, where the material is just translated to Norwegian and frequently omitting the source. The latest example is posted today in the main Norwegian financial daily Dagens Naeringsliv. The editor, Stein B. Hauglid, has published an article today about Chinese investments in the USA (På innsiden: Dollarfellen), which I might add, I found very interesting though also very familiar, as a very similar article was published by Paul Krugman in the New York Times on 2 April (China’s Dollar Trap).

This happens all the time in the main Norwegian dailies and certain magazines. It seems that quality journalism is too expensive, not to mention hard work, so sometimes the temptation to cheat just a little bit is too big. Who is going to find out anyway?

My custom search engine only indexes other UK job sites and company job-listings. The first version is pretty basic in its lay-out, perhaps a bit inspired by the original Google search engine. Now the more challenging job is to attract some test users as well!