Thank you to Achilles for bringing Google Flu Trends to my attention. Google has discovered that, since people tend to search for “flu” when they have the flu, their search statistics pretty closely track the CDC’s tracking data. Inspired, I punched some other terms into Google Trends.
First of all, I have determined that vampire, werewolf, and zombie attacks are NOT on the rise, despite what you’ve been hearing in the media.
However, “flowers” turns out to be an interesting search term. In the United States, there are two spikes every year, one in early February and the other in early May. In the United Kingdom, the second spike usually arrives a little bit earlier.