Google Trends as a Surveillance Tool for Dermatophytoses and Dermatomycoses in Indonesia

Abstrak

Background The global review of invasive fungal infections (IFI) in recent years did not include data from Indonesia bacause lack of pravalence data and its change over time. This paper aims to study the possibility of Google Trends as a tool to estimate the regional differences in the relative prevalence of IFI in Indonesia and its change over time. The research was conducted by searching for keywords related to tinea corporis and pityriasis versicolor in Indonesian on Google Trends using the 2016-2021 annual data. Data is restricted to the health category. The outputs in search interest and related queries are analyzed to see the ongoing trend. The results show that data from Google Trends shows a pattern that indicates the existence of specific areas that always have a high search interest for dermatomycoses. This article demonstrates that it is possible to use Google Trends to estimate which province has a higher or lower prevalence of invasive fungal infections than others and to see the changing over time. This paper provides new evidence of the capabilities of Google Trends in disease surveillance, particularly in developing countries.