Robert_Charlton - 7:15 pm on Dec 15, 2010 (gmt 0)

As for flu trends, "stuffy nose" may be better than "flu"

Yes... to be clear, the correlations Google Flu was watching were with queries for symptoms... coughing, sneezes, muscle aches, etc... not for the word "flu" itself.

I'd think that heightened awareness would still skew such searches, though, and the question of intent then comes into it. Maybe Google used searches for cough meds as a further refinement.