It is important to study public interest in cancer to improve prevention campaigns and increase awareness about malignancies. Since most of the population uses internet search engines to find information about nearly everything including health topics, internet data presents novel opportunities to study public interest in a disease. Previous studies from the U.S.A. have already demonstrated significant correlations between web search volume and cancer incidence. However, such studies are rare for Germany. 

The aim of this project is to identify local and temporal associations between cancer incidence and Google search volume for cancer diseases in Germany by combining search data extracted with Google Ads Keyword Planner and cancer registry data from the Robert Koch Institute. The second aim is to study public interest in cancer by using web search data. The project focuses on different cancer entities including colorectal cancer (C18-C20), lung cancer (C34), melanoma (C43), breast cancer (C50), cervical cancer (C53), prostate cancer (C61), testicular cancer (C63), and brain tumors (C71).