Google has decided to shut down the Google Flu Trends service, which provided search activity for the flu and dengue fever to suggest the presence of such diseases in certain places around the world. The search giant will keep providing its data to organizations such as the Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s influenza division. Other organizations can also get this data by contacting Google directly. Also, the historical information will still be available to the public.

Flu continues to affect millions of people every year, and while it’s still early days for nowcasting and similar tools for understanding the spread of diseases like flu and dengue fever – we’re excited to see what comes next.

A small team of Google’s software engineers first started working on Flu Trends in 2008 to explore “how real-world phenomena could be modeled using patterns in search queries.” We’re kinda sorry to see it shutting down, but for those still looking to get this information, there’s Sickweather, the service that provides an overview of where symptoms occur in real-time, displaying its finding on a weather-like map all with cloud and storm activity.