Google Trends Data Highlights Medical and Healthcare App Growth

Google Search continues to be the dominant internet search engine. Trends in internet keyword searches over time monitor the growth (and waning) of products and topics. Google provides a keyword search tool called Google Trends that allows users to map relative keyword searches over time and compare multiple keyword search trends. I recently examined the trends related to the search term medical app on Google Trends. I found some expected and unexpected findings in this analysis. This is the first post in a series highlighting interesting insights from this untapped source.

Google Trends can be found under the even more tools on the Google Search page. I entered medical app under the first search term and then added some additional related search terms (weight loss app, diabetes app) for comparison. Google Trends produces a relative search frequency by term graph as well as information about global and regional distribution of specific term searches.  A Google Trends timeline screenshot as well as two geographic screenshots for medical app searches were analyzed.

The first screenshot shows the graph for Interest over time for these three keyword searches. The graph is scaled from 0 to 100. The graph does not represent actual number of searches, but sets the highest number in the series as 100 and then normalizes all other data in the series to this number. The trend for keyword medical app search only emerged in 2007 but has had a steady consistent rise in search interest. For comparison purposes, weight loss app and diabetes app show similar increases but are less frequently searched than the general term medical app...