Search Trends in Medicine via Google
A fun little online tool I recently came across is Google Trends which gives information on trends and popularity of common search terms on Google. I did a little experiment to see how various medical specialties stack up. The top graph is volume of people who have searched a particular term. The bottom graph indicates news references to those specific terms. I have to say I was a bit surprised by some of these trends. Read on for some casual observations…
1. The term radiology is a very popular search term, in fact, the most popular for the medical specialties I searched. No major surprise there consider it can really encompass any disease entity or process.
2. The popularity of dermatology as a search term is rather shocking. Wow, there are tons and tons of people looking up stuff related to the disease of the skin. Very fascinating indeed that Derm trounced other specialties such as cardiology and neurology.
3. While relatively not as popular as other specialty search terms, Cardiology really shows it’s strength regarding news references with 3 massive spikes in cardiology related news during the last 12 months. I cross references a couple dates and the largest spike in late March coincides with the ACC annual meeting. The PR guys at ACC are sure getting their money’s worth.
4. The major news bump in radiology corresponds to end of November, obviously, in line with RSNA. Surprisingly, there is no significant bump in news volume corresponding to ACR’s annual conference usually held in early May.
Feel free to play around with it a little more. Here are couple other search terms I looked up that might interest you.
Teleradiology (click here):
The term was virtually unheard of prior to late 2004 based on Google indexed searches (the few spikes from late 2004 to 2005 might be periods where Google didn’t track the term because it was so new). Interesting, the overall trend has been a general decline. Of note, Google also reports out demographics about where such terms come from…can you guess (click on link to see geographic data)? That’s right…India, by far and away the most popular source of the search term.
Professional Schools (click here):
Ah, if only people knew how much law school robs you of your soul (thankfully my fiancé’s is still intact). Still a popular term but showing an overall downward trend over the last several years. Medicine too has noticed a slight drop possibly due to decreasing desire for people to commit to professional schools in this “get out college and make big bucks in finance” mentality of the past few years. Dental school still remains the bastard step child although I know a few dentists that can’t really complain about their decisions.
You bring up some interesting points here. This makes me wonder what issues are arrising out of all the individuals diagnosing their own symptoms. Is self diagnosis a positive issue for the medical community or does it have major negative implications?
I discovered this tool recently too. Isn’t it interesting what people search? Radiology technician is supposedly one of the top searched terms in Allied Health Field. I could see why since it is a well paid profession with less education then like a doctor. Have you ever tried this complimentary tool for Google? http://www.google.com/insights/search/ You might want to check it out.
Amazing how Teleradiology kind of tails off over the year
Ya Dear Google Trends, an awesome tool, helps us graphically examine the volume of keywords and also used to target keywords in times of high demand. It also helps us get the region-wise, city-wise and language-wise usage of keywords…I did a thorough checking of EMR, PACS, PET, MRI etc…great tool indeed!
Thank you Dear…