Today we have over a thousand confirmed cases of swine flu around the globe. The swine flu is huge news event covered comprehensively by the different medias (TV, Press, Radio…) and a large part of the population wants more information on it.

Based on Google traffic estimation, there were over three million online searches in April 2009 for keywords relevant to the swine flu.

Swine Flu - Traffic Estimation

The weird thing is that Google is making an incredible amount of money with this enormous number of searches via its Pay per Click (PPC) service. For example in England, the NHS (National Health Service) and the Directgov (official site of the English government) are the top PPC results, many others also bet on swine flu related keywords, the face masks manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, online newspapers et.c.

Swine Flu - Google Result Page

With an average of $0.5 per click, over 140 bidders and three million monthly searches you can guess how much money Google is making.