Google Search Trends in Oncology and the Impact of Celebrity Cancer Awareness

There is widespread public interest when celebrities are diagnosed with cancer. We sought to assess how this interest impacts awareness in prevalent cancers. We reviewed eleven common cancer-related search terms using Google Trends (Mountain View, CA) between the years 2004-2017 and retrospectively correlated these findings with media or celebrity related events. The Google Trends application was used to obtain the “search volume index” (SVI),...