In healthcare, perhaps it’s time to stop dismissing Google searches as the work of amateurs and start seeing online search engines as windows into how patients are thinking and feeling.
That’s the takeaway from a commentary in STAT by a researcher at — gasp — Microsoft.
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“In the balance of risk and reward regarding using search data for crowdsourced health, we have clearly moved towards rewards,” wrote Elad Yom-Tov, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a visiting scientist at the Technion-Israel Institute for Technology.
“Medical researchers should think of online searches and other Internet data as new tools in their toolbox, especially when traditional methods of medical research cannot help or are prohibitively expensive,” Yom-Tov said.
He noted that privacy groups initially dismissed Google Flu Trends when it came online in 2009, but it proved to be highly useful in its first few flu seasons. Its influence has waned or been questioned in recent years, but the concept of “crowdsourced health” has caught on with public-health researchers.
“Since then, progress has been made in the way we store and process these data, in our ability to protect user privacy through anonymization and aggregation, and in our understanding of the ethical challenges that arise when using these data,” Yom-Tov said. “We are also learning more and more about the potential of Internet data to improve public health.”
Why? “I once heard someone quip that, ‘Google is worth three times as much as Facebook because Facebook knows what you tell your friends, but Google know what you do in the privacy of your room.'” Yom-Tov said.
