The web page for Google Flu Trends is an internet monument to a digital health idea that failed.

Google once claimed it could predict flu outbreaks based on search number for flu-like symptoms with 97% accuracy.

But it shut down the project in 2015 after studies showed that it over- or underestimated several flu seasons because people searched for flu symptoms for various reasons, not just because they thought they had it.

Now researchers from the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Oxford have had another go at using search engine data to predict flu outbreaks.