Today, Google’s philanthropic unit unveiled a groundbreaking new tool, Flu Trends, which, through Google’s advanced algorithms, can accurately track and predict geographically the outbreak of Influenza (flu).  The project’s effectiveness hinges on the simple idea that people who are feeling ill will turn to the Web for information.

Google, which captures and records search queries like “muscle aches” and “flu symptoms,” suggests their service can accurately predict an outbreak 10 days before the Center for Disease Control.

Some public health experts argue Google’s accelerated prediction can, if correct, work to lower the 36,000 flu-related US deaths a year. While others say that their predictions are unproven and often unnecessary as local health boards daily gather data from emergency rooms to keep tabs on disease trends in their own communities. “We don’t have any evidence that this is more timely than our emergency room data,” said Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. But Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google.org, argues otherwise, “We know it matches very, very well in the way flu developed in the last year.” Reports of flu are expected to increase as we approach the winter months, so we’ll know shortly who bet on the right horse.

“From a technological perspective, it is the beginning,” said Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. Indeed, it is just the “beginning,” as these interesting, predictive results could theoretically be applied to any number of search queries, like politics and the stock market.

Could Google predict voter turnout and intentions? It’s a powerful question – one which I wish we had the answer to 3 months ago. The collective intelligence gained by recording this data is particularly powerful if we can first assume the keywords and phrases entered by individuals into a service like Google represent their immediate intentions. For example, a potential voter in (a nondescript target state) enters the query “Barack Obama,” and www.BarackObama.com is returned in the search results. This voter, who we can now assume is at least an undecided, in turn visits Obama’s campaign site and stays an approximated 15 minutes. While we’re still in the realm of speculation, we can now assume this voter is at least a soft, if not hard, Obama leaner.

The full extent to which this data—and the general free flow of information—can be employed is unknown. What is known, however, is that we’re just scratching the surface of what is possible through “collective intelligence.”