Pain Sufferers and Internet Search Behavior

Introduction

Over half of all health seekers using the Internet suffer from chronic conditions, including pain. This is from a Pew Internet and American Life report titled "Vital Decisions" released in May of 2002. Chronic sufferers were more likely to research their condition over the long term than non-chronic sufferers. Much like those facing elective procedures, chronic condition sufferers research more about their condition and bring that research to their doctor.

Pain management has had a strong Internet following

We know this not only through surveys like Pew but also empirically through cached search terms logged by the search engines themselves. We can chart the popularity of Internet searches through this primary data. This list below comes from data compiled by Wordtracker using searches from Dogpile and Metacrawler. The sample was taken from 373 million searches over the last 60 days. The words on this list were all used to find articles related to fibromyalgia. Note some of the keywords highlight related concepts such as "woman" and "sleep".

Search Strategies for Pain Sufferers

If we were to dig deeper, we would find longer and more interesting keyword phrases being used by the same health seekers to find information. On the Overture network, a large collection of websites using pay-per-click marketing, the following were searches and frequencies of the term "fibromyalgia".