Google Health Search Trends


An interactive charts to explore the search trends of people for common health issues in the United States

How has the search interest for top health issues or diseases change over time ? And how does it compare with the real-life leading causes of death ? To investigate this question, our team used the online search data in the US from 2004 to 2017 provided by Google Trends data as well as the leading death-causing diseases data provided by the US CDC data. Google Trends data in particular allows us to see what people are searching for at a very local level. We will compare them with the actual location of occurrences for those same health conditions to understand how online search data reflects real life for millions of Americans.




Health Search Volume by State and Region

Zooming in further, geologically, we will see which states or cities had more interests in searching for health issues. From 2004 to 2017, the data showed that search interest gradually increased over the years. Certain regions show a more significant increase in search interest than others. The increase in search activity was greatest in California, Texas, and New York.

The Trend of The Change in The Total Search Volume

It could be observed that the online searching volume of the diseases overall showed an increasing tendency. This result coincides and could be explained by technological advancements in terms of the growth of internet and people's growing reliance on telehealth.

Health Search in Each State

The detailed searching trends of each disease in each state are displayed below.

Searching Trends of Each Health Condition

How does the online searching interest in each health condition change in themselves per se? All of the observed diseases had demonstrated an upward tendency over the years from 2004 to 2017.

Often, many diseases have comorbidities; that is, they tend to co-occur with other diseases. For example, it could be assumed that obesity and diabetes might be largely correlated, and our data confirms that assumption. (Hint: You could click on the health conditions to highlight only obesity and diabetes to compare them.)

But more comprehensively, how do all the health conditions correlate with each other?

Health Search in Each State

The detailed searching trends of each disease in each state are displayed below.

Apart from the main effects where California, Texas, and New York had the largest overall online search volumes, it is shown that cancer had been overwhelmingly the most searched health condition among all in most of the states.

But more comprehensively, how do all the health conditions correlate with each other?

The following visualization confirms that cancer's popularity in online search.

Correlations Among the Health Conditions

The following diagram shows the online search correlations among all the observed diseases according to our data. The stonger correlations are in the darker shades.

Of course, however, correlation does not often imply causation, so some of the coorelations might still be coincidental. Our visualization only provides a reference of information.

Overall, it is observed that the online health search interest has been and presumably will be increasing in the United States, especially in the more metropolitan areas such as New York, California, and Texas. Cancer has been the most searched disease.

10 Leading Causes of Death Per 100,000 Population from 2004-2017