Alexis Madrigal of ABCNews reports that Google – and its nonprofit branch, Google.org, will start tracking disease outbreaks.

A new website, HealthMap, addresses that challenge by siphoning up text from Google News, the World Health Organization and online discussion groups, then filtering it and boiling it down into mapped data that researchers — and the public — can use to track new disease outbreaks, region by region.

“There is so much information on the web about disease outbreaks but it’s obscured by garbage and noise,” said John Brownstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and co-founder of HealthMap.org. “The idea of HealthMap is to get filtered, valuable information to the public and public health community in one freely available resource.”

The site’s free accessibility could be particularly important in the developing world, where poor public health infrastructure and lack of money has handicapped epidemiological efforts. That’s a problem because those regions are exactly where scientists predict new and dangerous diseases are likely to emerge.

HealthMap goes beyond the standard mashup and is more like a small-scale implementation of the long-awaited semantic web. The site, which the researchers describe in the latest issue of open access PLoS Medicine, creates machine-readable public health information from the text indexed by Google News, World Health Organization updates and online listserv discussions

Researchers Track Disease With Google News, Google.org Money