Series: Exploring Google Trends as an Additional Tool for Researchers and Policymakers During Crises

Surgo Ventures developed a three-part series deep-diving into what can be learned from Google Trends during COVID-19.

Researchers have used Google Trends searches as proxies for changes in human behavior during major events. Surgo’s series builds on this approach to consider how Google Trends can be an additional near-real-time monitoring and decision-making tool for researchers and policymakers during future uncertain times.

In Part 1, How Google Trends can help us plan and respond better to future pandemics, we explored the broad impact of COVID-19 through national and state-level search trends for economic, social, and health-related queries juxtaposed with the US government’s policies, just as the pandemic was developing. This article summarizes our recent paper published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). 

In Part 2, What Google searches tell us about interest in the COVID-19 vaccine, we focused specifically on the timely topic of COVID-19 vaccines and developed a framework of sentinel indicators to track and analyze search interest in vaccine topics of ‘access’, ‘general’ information, and ‘risks’. 

In Part 3, How Google searches signal barriers to COVID-19 vaccine supply and demand, we expand on this indicator framework using modeling to investigate how COVID-19 vaccine searches (especially ‘access’ searches) are related to actual vaccine uptake barriers, demand, and speed of rollout.

The series is filled with graphics and data visualization to illustrate our findings, as well as lays out clear recommendations, which could help the government and public health leaders to respond more quickly and effectively to people’s needs and worries in future crises.