title: Can Google Searches Predict the Popularity and Harm of Psychoactive Agents?
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Predicting the popularity of and harm caused by psychoactive agents is a serious problem that would be difficult to do by a single simple method. However, because of the growing number of drugs it is very important to provide a simple and fast tool for predicting some characteristics of these substances. We were inspired by the Google Flu Trends study on the activity of the influenza virus, which showed that influenza virus activity worldwide can be monitored based on queries entered into the Google search engine.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  Our aim was to propose a fast method for ranking the most popular and most harmful drugs based on easily available data gathered from the Internet.
  
  
  METHODS
  We used the Google search engine to acquire data for the ranking lists. Subsequently, using the resulting list and the frequency of hits for the respective psychoactive drugs combined with the word "harm" or "harmful", we estimated quickly how much harm is associated with each drug.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We ranked the most popular and harmful psychoactive drugs. As we conducted the research over a period of several months, we noted that the relative popularity indexes tended to change depending on when we obtained them. This suggests that the data may be useful in monitoring changes over time in the use of each of these psychoactive agents.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our data correlate well with the results from a multicriteria decision analysis of drug harms in the United Kingdom. We showed that Google search data can be a valuable source of information to assess the popularity of and harm caused by psychoactive agents and may help in monitoring drug use trends.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Chemistry, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poznan, Poland. wojciech.jankowski89@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Wojciech
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2058-6945
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Jankowski
authors.forename: Marcin
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1729-977X
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hoffmann
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011619:Psychotropic Drugs / Q000009:adverse effects / Q000032:analysis*; D057386:Search Engine / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*
chemical_list: D011619:Psychotropic Drugs
keywords: Internet; drugs; forecasting; narcotics; psychoactive agents; trends