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Health is driven in large and small ways by inner biologic clocks set to daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms. So perhaps it should be no surprise that health-information-seeking behavior also follows the clock and calendar. According to researchers from San Diego State University in California and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, people are most interested in health information on Mondays and Tuesdays.
The researchers monitored Google search queries between 2005 and 2012 that included the word “healthy” and were Google-classified as health related (eg, “healthy recipes” vs “healthy salary”). They then analyzed the data to discover whether there was a circaseptan rhythm, or weekly trend.
Healthy queries in the U.S. peaked early in the week, declined through Saturday, and “modestly” rebounded on Sunday. Search volumes were more consistent by day of the week than across spans within a week, the researchers say. In other words, they explain, “Mondays are more like other Mondays than the neighboring Sunday or Tuesday.” The researchers hypothesize that the trend may be, in part, because weekend excesses make people feel guilty.
The searchers were not spurred by media coverage, where the rhythms were substantially different. For the media, Wednesday was the big health day with about 9% more health coverage than on Monday.
The researchers note that, while their study has some limitations in that findings cannot be precisely linked to raw search volumes, the numbers are not small. They cite another study that found 5% of all global searches are health related. In 2012, people searched Google 1.2 trillion times. Do the math and it’s clear that awareness of the circaseptan rhythm can be useful for public health campaigns, the researchers suggest. Simply targeting people early in the week rather than throughout the week could both make targeting for health-related topics more effective and be more cost-effective.
Source
Ayers JW, Althouse BM, Johnson M, Dredze M, Cohen JE. Am J Prev Med. 2014;47(1):73-76.
doi: 10.1016/j.amepre.2014.02.003.