Is Google Trends a reliable tool for digital epidemiology? Insights from different clinical settings

Internet-derived information has been recently recognized as a valuable tool for epidemiological investigation. Google Trends, a Google Inc. portal, generates data on geographical and temporal patterns according to specified keywords. The aim of this study was to compare the reliability of Google Tr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of epidemiology and global health Vol. 7; no. 3; pp. 185 - 189
Main Authors: Cervellin, Gianfranco, Comelli, Ivan, Lippi, Giuseppe
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Dordrecht Elsevier Ltd 01.09.2017
Springer Netherlands
Springer Nature B.V
Atlantis Press
Springer
Subjects:
Cooking
Data Accuracy
Data Collection - methods
Data Collection - trends
Digital epidemiology
Ebola virus
Ebolavirus
Epidemiologic Methods
Epidemiologic Studies
Epidemiology
Epistaxis
Fever
Google Trends
Humans
Internal Medicine
Internet - standards
Internet - statistics & numerical data
Internet - trends
Legionella
Media coverage
Medical Informatics Computing - trends
Meningitis
Mushroom poisoning
Pneumonia
Poisoning
Rare diseases
Renal colic
Reproducibility of Results
Research Article
Resource Allocation - methods
Resource Allocation - trends
Seasonal variations
Trends
Google Trends
Epistaxis
Digital epidemiology
Mushroom poisoning
Renal colic
ISSN:2210-6006, 2210-6014, 2210-6014, 2210-6006
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Internet-derived information has been recently recognized as a valuable tool for epidemiological investigation. Google Trends, a Google Inc. portal, generates data on geographical and temporal patterns according to specified keywords. The aim of this study was to compare the reliability of Google Trends in different clinical settings, for both common diseases with lower media coverage, and for less common diseases attracting major media coverage. We carried out a search in Google Trends using the keywords “renal colic”, “epistaxis”, and “mushroom poisoning”, selected on the basis of available and reliable epidemiological data. Besides this search, we carried out a second search for three clinical conditions (i.e., “meningitis”, “Legionella Pneumophila pneumonia”, and “Ebola fever”), which recently received major focus by the Italian media. In our analysis, no correlation was found between data captured from Google Trends and epidemiology of renal colics, epistaxis and mushroom poisoning. Only when searching for the term “mushroom” alone the Google Trends search generated a seasonal pattern which almost overlaps with the epidemiological profile, but this was probably mostly due to searches for harvesting and cooking rather than to for poisoning. The Google Trends data also failed to reflect the geographical and temporary patterns of disease for meningitis, Legionella Pneumophila pneumonia and Ebola fever. The results of our study confirm that Google Trends has modest reliability for defining the epidemiology of relatively common diseases with minor media coverage, or relatively rare diseases with higher audience. Overall, Google Trends seems to be more influenced by the media clamor than by true epidemiological burden.
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ISSN:2210-6006
2210-6014
2210-6014
2210-6006
DOI:10.1016/j.jegh.2017.06.001