gms | German Medical Science

Objective: Google is the most popular search engine amongst internet users. About 1 billion people use Google every month to obtain information and to help them make decisions about more or less important topics of their lives. Google Trends is an integrated tool that allows us to obtain Google's statistics from the last decade. At the moment, there are two methods available to evaluate users' search behavior: "search terms" only include queries including the exact term, whereas "search topics" include all queries within the field of interest. "Search topics" is in a beta version at the moment and is therefore available for a limited number of topics only. Our aim was to evaluate whether Google Trends is a useful tool to assess the public's interest in neurosurgical topics.

Method: We obtained Google Trends statistics for the neurosurgical "Search topics" 'hydrocephalus', 'spinal stenosis', 'concussion', 'vestibular schwannoma' and 'cerebral arteriovenous malformation'. The queries were then analyzed for internet users' behavior and compared to the number of publications on PubMed listed under the corresponding MeSH terms. In addition, we evaluated the search behavior for the "Search terms" 'glioblastoma', 'meningioma' and 'vestibular schwannoma'.

Results: Over the last ten years there has been an increasing interest in the topic 'concussion'. This trend is also reflected in the number of publications on PubMed. 'Spinal stenosis', 'concussion' and 'vestibular schwannoma' are topics that are of special interest in 1^st world countries, whereas 'hydrocephalus' is a popular topic in 2^nd and 3^rd world countries. 'Cerebral arteriovenous malformation' appears to be especially relevant to Japanese users. The so-called "top searches" within the topics revealed more details about people's interests, e.g. 'normal pressure hydrocephalus' or 'football concussion' ranked amongst the most popular search queries within the corresponding topics. 'Glioblastoma' and 'meningioma' showed similar amounts of queries, whereas there were relatively fewer queries including the term 'vestibular schwannoma'.

Conclusions: Google Trends is a useful tool to detect general tendencies in peoples' interests and the importance of different diseases in various countries. It can be used by neurosurgeons to identify further questions. Public relations work, such as hospitals' internet presence, can be guided by the users' interest in order to achieve general education with a high professional standard.