Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the search giant, worked with historical seasonal flu data from the Victorian Infectious Disease Reference Laboratory (VIDRL) along with its own search history data.

The tool will be hosted on the Google.org domain.

"In terms of our methodology, we used a publicly available system through the state of Victoria and selected queries that correspond with this data," says Matt Mohebbi, software engineer at Google.

"When flu is up, you can see queries go up and when flu is going down, you can see queries go down. We plan to do a retrospective analysis to see whether or not the same correspondence that we've seen historically ends up holding true in the future," he says.

Another feature of the tool, is that it has the capability to detect flu outbreaks and can also be updated on a daily basis.

"Being able to get estimates of influenza-like activity days or even weeks ahead of other surveillance systems, could provide public health officials with the ability to begin preparing," Roni Zeiger, product manager at Google says.

For example, doctors can be made aware about an increasing amount of influenza to ensure the appropriate medicines and hospital beds are available at the right place and time. Public health officials will have access to a download data link to conduct further analysis.

The tool has already been launched in the US and Mexico last year. However, the Australian version, will not cover the Northern Territory or Tasmania, due to the fact that there isn't a sufficient amount of query volume in those areas.