Google Trends as a surveillance tool for misinformation monitoring

Lawyers tasked with research related to drafting employment policy and procedures may benefit from research tools like Google Trends.  Knowledge of trends with respect to growing misinformation may assist with policy roll out and assist with issues related to vaccine hesitancy.

Google has been under-researched when it comes to spreading misinformation. One study showed how Google’s autocomplete search algorithms’ labels promote some conspiracy theorists and hate figures. In addition to search, Google offers several digital services such as Google Trends, which is a web-based platform that compares the volume of various search queries in Google’s search engine over a period. These include searches for web, image, or news, as well as queries in Google shopping and YouTube. Google Trends highlights the popularity of the most searched queries using categories such as regions and languages. The Google Trends results offer insight into geographical locations and associated keywords using a scale of 0 to 100, which is the maximum search score. By January 2024, 91.47% of all online search queries were made on Google, with a reported average of 6.3 billion searches a minute by the end of 2023. Google search data presents useful insight into widespread public concerns and patterns of queries on a given political or health topic. Google Trends can serve as a valuable means for capturing problematic searches and spikes in terms related to misinformation terms in real time. Further, Google Trends can provide rapid initial assessments of social, political, and health issues to inform policy and intervention purposes.

Data derived from internet search queries can provide immediate indicators of public interest in a health issue such as HIV, epidemics, or emerging viruses. The near real-time insights are especially relevant for issues which necessitate rapid government responses and public health interventions as is the case for infectious diseases like Tuberculosis. A pre-Covid study analyzed large numbers of Google Trends to track influenza events in the United States. Examining the volume index of Google Trends searches also demonstrated how spikes in queries for symptoms of West Nile disease correlated with peak seasons and heightened rates of disease cases per CDC reports. In some cases, search activity has helped to forecast peak periods in viral infections, occurrence of H5N2 epidemics, and provided early signals to regional outbreaks of influenza which could enable prompt responses from the appropriate health authorities. Previous research on misinformation using Google Trends and referencing Canada is quite limited as there are few studies— such as one that explored COVID-19 misinformation and another one that focused on climate change and beliefs in hoaxes. 

We believe that Google Trends can also be used as an early warning tool to identify misinformation and various other issues affecting public health. In this respect, we made preliminary evaluations using some misinformation-related search terms like fake pandemic, pandemic fraud, covidhoax 2020, and fakevirus to determine if there are any connections with search interests in Canada. A Google Trends search for these terms (Figure 1), revealed that the keyword “fake virus,” represented in green, had several peaks during different years and months. Blue indicates interest in “fake pandemic” which was higher in the months of March, May, and April in 2020 and peaked again in January 2022. Red indicates interest in “pandemic fraud” which peaked in September 2022, May 2023, and April 2024. Yellow was for “covidhoax 2020” which peaked on May 2.

Figure 1: Screenshot of interest for keywords associated with skepticism about the Covid-19 pandemic such as “fake pandemic,” “pandemic fraud,” “covidhoax 2020,” and “fake virus” from January 2020 to August 2024.

In another comparison of search terms related to pandemic denial, Google Trends showed a regional breakdown illustrating higher interest for specific terms in certain provinces for specific keywords (Figure 2). For instance, “fake pandemic,” highlighted in red, was most prominent in Manitoba (66) and Ontario (66), “fake virus” garnered higher interest in British Columbia (100), Saskatchewan (100), and Nova Scotia (100). These results can offer insight on vaccination hesitancy to be compared with actual vaccination intakes in different Canadian provinces.

Figure 2. A screenshot of a Google Trends graph showing regional interest of the terms “fake pandemic,” “fake virus,” “false positives,” in Canada, with dark shades showing regions with higher interest.

Next, using a digital tool called PyTrends, we explored 107 misinformation related terms, phrases, and their variations without specifying a national context. These terms are associated with politics, climate change, and health such as (Great Reset, Great Awakening, 5Gvirus, New World Order, flat earth, scamdemic, Fake Pandemic, fake virus, shamdemic, casedemic, pandemic fraud, plandemic, plandemic hoax, scamdemic is over, Holocough, Masks do not work, Masks don’t work, vaccines kill, No vaccines, no new normal, and others).

Compared to the rest of the world, Canada is ranked 2^nd together with the UK (n=1,300) in terms of the volume of searches only preceded by the United States (n=1,400). The top ten terms that most Googled globally are: Flat Earth, New World Order, Great Reset, No New Normal, Climate Hoax, Vaccine deaths, Hoax Climate, Vaccine injury, Covid Hoax, and Plandemic. Canadians searched thirty words and phrases from our selected misinformation- related terms, in comparison to Americans who searched for thirty-two terms, and the UK, who searches twenty-eight terms. The top 10 searches in Canada from the above terms include: Climate Nonsense, Fake Virus, Vaccine deaths, Plandemic, Flat Earth, New World Order, Great Reset, Climate Hoax, and Covid Hoax.

It is useful to use Google Trends to monitor misinformation and track the temporal and regional variations in Canada, and globally, where certain spikes occur. It is also useful to compare the results of the Google Trends tool with other types of data and indicators like news events, Wikipedia search spikes, and social media trends.  Knowledge of misinformation trends through the Google Trends tool may assist lawyers when presenting policy updates at the workplace and will help to address public and worker concerns that are based on unreliable sources. 

Authors' Note: The authors would like to thank Vishal Shukla for preparing the Python script that helped in searching for the 107 misinformation terms, and Sadia Nasrin for searching for some of the terms we used and for exploring relevant research studies.