Diabetes on the decline?
Google thinks so. Google has an application called Google Trends that allows you to view the long-term trends for search terms used on the Google search engine. According to Google Trends, over the past five years, the number of searches for the term “diabetes” has been slowly declining.
What does this say about diabetes? You’d think that if diabetes is on the rise worldwide (and I think there’s general agreement that it is) that Google would have an increase in the number of searches for that term.
Well, if you take a look at Google Trends for some other general health-related search terms, they show similar trends. For example,
All of these show a similar long-term downward trend. Even non-health-related search terms show a downward trend:
Interestingly, automobile is dropping dramatically and running is very close but not quite level.
My theory about these downward trends, and about the diabetes search term in particular, is that it says very little about the popularity of the activity or object or the incidence of the disease. Instead, it’s all about the evolving nature of life online. People are getting more sophisticated in their online activities. They’re less likely to find satisfaction in searching for a generic term like “diabetes” or “cancer” or “running.” I mean, it isn’t helpful when Google returns over 65 million results when you search for “diabetes.” Plus, five years ago we didn’t have the concept of social networking sites like Flickr, Twitter, facebook, myspace, etc. so people are finding places other than Google to go to for information. That’s my theory. Anybody have other ideas? I’d love to hear them.
