Apparently it might be able to. Google has launched a flu trend service that can be used to determine the trends behind a flu pandemic / seasonal flu.

The flu trends faq hints at being able to detect pandemic flu. The quote from the faq reads

How is Google Flu Trends useful for pandemic flu?
Google Flu Trends models are built based on historic flu surveillance data. When a new flu virus causes the same symptoms as seasonal flu, Google Flu Trends can detect if overall flu rates are significantly increasing. Some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu is happening, and are therefore good indicators of flu activity.

Google tries to understand search data and its related patterns and then determines if the search was related to a flu in any way. It then maps this search to geo data to find out how the flu spreads.

This service is really neat. However it may not actually hint at flu levels for a given country / city. Just because I search for ‘swine flu’,  does not mean I have it. I might simply be interested in knowing what swine flu is all about. It can be argued however that regions that have swine flu cases will search more for preventive measures, vaccinations, drugs to take etc etc. Interestingly the service is also available in mexico although it is supposed to be experimental (in mexico) for now.

So how can google cross verify search data with actual statistics ? They thought about that as well. Google expects governments to provide data on influenza like illnesses. Once the service is launched for that country, the online data is matched with the data provided by the government.