Effectivity of Awareness Months in Increasing Internet Search Activity for Top Malignancies Among Women

In a recent article, Ling et al. hypothesized that following the launch of a campaign for a medical condition, information seeking behavior pertaining to the condition would increase as well [1]. They used data from Google Trends (Google Inc., CA) on 4 different diseases (including Colon Cancer) to conclude that the use of infoveillance (type of public health surveillance based on online content analysis),shows promise as an alternative and inexpensive solution for disease surveillance and health care campaign evaluation. While a number of health campaigns are rolled out by the government and professional societies, there are limited means and tools to evaluate the effectivity of these campaigns. Using infoveillance, the ‘digital impact’ of various healthand disease-related campaigns can be assessed.