Is Google Trends a reliable way to determine digital dental epidemiology?
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google trends, peri-implantitis, forecasting
Abstract
Aim: Google Trends, which allows Internet users to interact with and search data, can provide in-depth information about new phenomena regarding population and health-related behavior and is a tool that can be accessed free of charge. With the widespread use of dental implants in almost every country in the world today, an increase has also been reported in the prevalence of peri-implantitis (PP), which is a peri-implant disease. The aim of this study is to determine whether the rates of PP that were obtained from previous studies on this disease are in line with the data obtained using Google Trends.
Methodology: Using observational, ecological research, we searched Google Trends for the following query terms: peri implantitis + periimplantitis, to obtain the volume of this Internet search query. The queries were searched within Spain (ES), Germany (DE), the Netherlands (NL), the United Kingdom (UK), and Turkey from January 2010 to December 2019.
Results: An examination of the search results for “peri-implantitis + peri-implantitis” on Google Trends found that the largest numbers of searches for these words were made from the country of ES, and the smallest numbers were made from Turkey. It took two years to make forecasts based on the results, and the study determined that there has been a change in the trends in countries that were searched for these words. Also, the results obtained in previous studies for the prevalence of peri-implantitis were not similar to the data obtained from Google Trends.
Conclusion: We concluded in this study that Google Trends is not a reliable tool for dental epidemiology.
How to cite this article: Üner DD, İzol BS. Is Google Trends a reliable way to determine digital dental epidemiology? Int Dent Res 2021;11(Suppl.1):38-46. https://doi.org/10.5577/intdentres.2021.vol11.suppl1.7
Linguistic Revision: The English in this manuscript has been checked by at least two professional editors, both native speakers of English.
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This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.