In the book 'The Big Data Revolution' by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, the first chapter explains how Google extracts value from its enormous pool of data. As an example, the well-known Google Flu Trends case is cited.
Google Flu Trends
The search engine is able to predict the spread of the winter flu in the US better than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Not only at the national level, but by region and even by state. Simply by analyzing the search behavior of its users.
“The Google folks had bet that searchers were looking for information about the flu—using search terms latvia phone number list like ‘cough and fever medicine’—but that wasn’t the point. So they designed a system where it didn’t matter what people searched for. The system just looked for correlations between the frequency of certain searches and the spread of the flu over time and space.
different mathematical models to test the search terms, and compared the predictions to the CDC’s actual flu case data from 2007 and 2008. And they hit a goldmine: their software found a combination of forty-five search terms that, when fed together into a mathematical model, showed a strong correlation between the predictions and the official national numbers. Like the CDC, they could tell where the flu had spread, but unlike the CDC, they could do it in near real time instead of a few weeks later.”
NSA's strategy
This week it leaked that the NSA uses a similar strategy as Google. Slurping up as much data as possible and linking it to each other. By combining data from Verizon , Google, Facebook and Apple, among others, the NSA gets its hands on a sample of N=everything . The initiative is called PRISM . A nice name, to indicate that from different angles the collected and combined data leads to new insights. A true goldmine for the American intelligence services.