What do you Google?

The small portion of the news that I got to see tonight, after coming home from a long night of work, was a report on Google. According to the news, Google has begun to track the amount of searches for flu symptoms. Apparently this is helping to determine how severe the flu outbreak is in any given area. Is this really a good use of spare time and technology? I understand that this helps doctors and whatnot to determine where the flu is the strongest. But I don't understand why this is a legitimate source. I took AP statistics last year. I know all about the numerous forms of bias that can affect an experiment. This Google data seems to me like it would have a lot of bias. There could be numerous reasons why people are searching flu symptoms. They could be doing some kind of research for a paper. They could be bored and just be googling random things. I think we are all gulty of that every once in a while. But I'm also concerned as to why this made the local news. Northwest Arkansas must be a very boring, low crime, no news city for this to be important.