That was a very different beast. It relied on using Google searches to infer the prevalence of various Influenza Like Illnesses in real time, while the CDC reports data with a 2-week lag. Notably, some of the queries they found to be correlated were... strange... like NBA results.
Not unsurprisingly (in hindsight, at least) [2], this eventually broke down when epidemics and flu symptoms got in the news and completely changed what people were searching for.
