"Cancer-Related Search Queries in the Philippines: A Trend Analysis Across a Fifteen-Year Period "

Abstract

Analyzing the trends of internet search queries can provide rapid, unrestricted, and valuable insight on health-seeking behaviors of entire populations. More than half of the Philippine population use the internet; however, trends of search queries have rarely been analyzed. This study analyzed the trends of cancer-related search queries in the Philippines over a fifteen-year period. For the period spanning December 31, 2007 to December 31, 2022 in the Philippines, Google TrendsTM was used to compute the search volume index (SVI) for pre-selected cancer-related search terms. Two-way repeated measures analysis of variance with post-hoc Dunnett’s multiple comparisons test was performed to detect a difference between the search terms across the period of study and to explore the trend of these differences. We observed statistically significant increases in SVI for the pre-selected terms from 2016 to 2022, indicating a significant increase in cancer-related search activity in the Philippines in recent years.