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More Diseases Tracked by Using Google Trends

Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: To the Editor: The idea that populations provide data on their influenza status through information-seeking behavior on the Web has been explored in the United States in recent years (1,2). Two reports showed that queries to the Internet search engines Yahoo and Google could be informative for influenza surveillance (2,3). Ginsberg et al. scanned the Google database and found that the sum of the results of 45 queries that most correlated with influenza incidences provided the best predictor of influenza trends (3). On the basis of trends of Google queries, these authors put their results into practice by creating a Web page dedicated to influenza surveillance. However, they did not develop the same approach for other diseases. To date, no studies have been published about the relationship of search engine query data with other diseases or in languages other than English.
Language: English
Subfield: Epidemiology
Field: Medicine
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2010793906
FWCI: 5.017
Cites: 8
Cited by: 257
Related to: 10