Microsoft researchers looked at anonymized queries on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, which indicated someone had pancreatic cancer. They then looked at previous search engine queries that person had entered to see if the searches were related to symptoms. The researchers found that such queries could serve as warnings or predictors of a future pancreatic cancer diagnosis, identifying between 5 and 15 percent of cases.
“We found that signals about patterns of queries in search logs can predict the future appearance of queries that are highly suggestive of a [pancreatic cancer] diagnosis,” the researchers wrote in their study, which was published in the Journal of Oncology Practice.
Search engine queries hold vast amounts of data and untapped insights into people’s behaviors and lifestyles, and this process could help identify cases of pancreatic cancer sooner, suggests a report in The New York Times.
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