Updated Mar 2, 2022
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This aggregated, anonymized data shows trends in search patterns related to COVID-19 vaccination. We’re making this data available because we heard from public health officials that trends in search patterns could help to design, target, and evaluate public education campaigns.
To visualize the data, try exploring our interactive dashboard.
These trends reflect the relative interest of Google searches related to COVID-19 vaccination. We split searches, by information need, across 3 categories:
- COVID-19 vaccination. All searches related to COVID-19 vaccination, indicating overall search interest in the topic. For example, “when can i get the covid vaccine” or “cdc vaccine tracker”. This parent category includes searches from the following 2 subcategories.
- Vaccination intent. Searches related to eligibility, availability, and accessibility of vaccines. For example, “covid vaccine near me” or “safeway covid vaccine”.
- Safety and side effects. Searches related to the safety and side effects of the vaccines. For example, “is the covid vaccine safe” or “pfizer vaccine side effects”.
We selected these categories based on the input from public health experts, as well as taking into consideration:
- data quality—for example, clear user intent
- privacy—for example, significant search volumes
A search classified in a subcategory, always also counts towards the parent “COVID-19 vaccination category”, however some COVID-19 vaccination searches may be classified in the parent category but neither subcategory (an example would be queries about COVID-19 vaccine brands).
The data covers the period starting Jan 2021 to the present. We’ll offer weekly updates covering the most recent week (Mon-Sun). Each update will be available a few days after the week ends—to allow time for data processing and validation.
These trends represent Google Search users and might not represent the exact behavior of a wider population. We expect, however, that any systematic regional biases will remain stable over the period covered by the dataset.
The data shows the relative interest in each of the search categories within a geographical region. To generate, normalize, and scale the weekly time series we do the following for each region—let’s consider an example region A:
- First, we count the queries classified in each of the categories in region A for that week. To determine the region, we estimate the location where the query was made. When counting the queries, a given anonymous search user can contribute at most once to each category per day, and to at most 3 different categories per day.
- Next, we divide this count by the total volume of queries (on any topic, not just those related to COVID-19 vaccination) in region A for that week to calculate relative interest. We call this proportion the normalized interest of a category. This is a relatively small number, which reflects the fraction of all search queries in that region that are related to the topic of COVID-19 vaccination or one of its subcategories.
(Initial release only) We establish a fixed scaling factor by finding the maximum weekly value of the normalized interest for the general COVID-19 vaccination category, at the US national level (which occured on the week starting at March 8). We scale this maximum value to 100 by multiplying it by a number which we set as the fixed scaling factor. We store the fixed scaling factor, and in subsequent updates we use it to scale values in all regions. - Finally, using our fixed scaling factor, we linearly scale all the other normalized interest values, across regions, categories, and time. These values can be lower or higher than 100 (but not less than 0). We call these values scaled normalized interest.
Because all scaled normalized interest values share the same scaling factor, you can do the following:
- Compare the relative interest of categories across all regions over any time interval.
- Calculate the fraction of COVID-19 vaccination queries that focus on the topic of vaccination intent. To do this for a region, divide the scaled normalized interest of the Vaccination intent or Safety and side effects categories by the COVID-19 vaccination category.
Sometimes it’s not possible to report trends for every region. When the weekly volume of data for a given region doesn't meet quality or privacy thresholds, we cannot provide data for some or all categories in that region. In such cases, the data for that region will still be counted in its parent region. For example, data for all the counties in the US state of Nebraska will be counted as part of Nebraska’s state trends. Because we omit the data for regions where the search volume doesn't meet our quality or privacy thresholds, we compute the data for each region directly from all the queries associated with that region, instead of using the aggregate data of its subregions.
Classifying web-search queries is challenging. Each query is a few words that can be illusory and ambiguous. So, we look at other signals beyond the query—especially the words and phrases found in the search results.
We use supervised machine learning to find the search queries that match the 3 categories. For each of the 3 categories, we trained a neural-network model with a single hidden layer. Each model has 60,000 input nodes, corresponding to words and phrases extracted from the query and the search results using information-gain criterion. We also added features to the model using entities found in the words and phrases (similar to this Google Cloud entity analysis).
Table 1 shows the top features we used for each category. Some of the features are common across the COVID-19 Vaccination parent category and the subcategories.
Table 1. Top features used for each category
| Category | Top features |
|---|---|
| COVID-19 vaccination (all countries) | covid vaccine, vaccines, vaccination, vaccinations, 19 vaccine, vaccine, vaccinated, covid 19, covid, coronavirus vaccine, immunization, coronavirus, covid vaccines, vaccine appointment, pfizer, health, pharmacy, second dose, cdc, doses |
| Vaccination intent (IE, UK) | appointment, appointments, book, booking, vaccination centre, clinic, vaccination centres, vaccine appointment, clinics, coronavirus covid, walk in, coronavirus vaccination, covid vaccination, vaccination clinic, vaccine clinic, centres, vaccination appointment, vaccine centre, centre, book covid, pfizer, astrazeneca |
| Vaccination intent (US) | pharmacy, pfizer, vaccine appointment, appointment, pharmacies, moderna, dose, appointments, pfizer vaccine, cvs, walgreens, second dose, vaccine appointments, cvs pharmacy, doses, shot, cvs covid, walgreens pharmacy, vaccine eligibility, moderna vaccine |
| Safety and side effects (all countries) | side effects, side effect, symptoms, fever, second dose, allergic reaction, moderna injection, pfizer, reactions, reaction, pfizer vaccine, pain, health, shot, pharmacy, allergic reactions, adverse effects, adverse reactions |
We trained each country’s models in a supervised manner using a sample of search queries made there during 2021— the period typically being a few months. We labeled the training data using a set of simple rules.
To develop the rules, we started by sampling a set of top queries that are associated with web pages about Covid-19 vaccines, Covid-19, or any vaccines. We manually marked each sample query as positive or negative against the three categories. For each category, we created rules from terms, phrases, and entities associated with the positive queries and rarely associated with the negative queries. For example, for the COVID-19 Vaccination category we require "vaccine" and “covid” to be among the top most relevant terms. Finally we used these rules to automatically label the rest of the training data.
To evaluate our classifiers’ capacity to detect queries about COVID-19 vaccinations, we relied on Google’s search quality raters who have deep experience with how health-related information needs are reflected in search queries. These raters were unknown to and independent of the developers of the classifiers. The raters were not aware of this project and did not know the purpose of their task.
Because only a small minority of Google Searches are for COVID-19 vaccination topics, we needed to create a sample set of queries for evaluation. We used Google Knowledge Graph entities to find queries which included high confidence positives, potential positives, and close negatives. For example, for the classifier used for COVID-19 vaccination category, we sampled top and random queries associated with the entity “Covid-19 Vaccination” (high precision), as well as queries that are only associated with the entity “Covid-19” or with “Vaccination” (high recall).
Table 2 shows the distribution of query ratings for each category. A neutral rating means either multiple raters entered a neutral rating for the query or there was no consensus. Queries that are rated as neutral are excluded from the classifier evaluation.
Table 2. Distribution of query ratings for the categories
| Category | Positives | Negatives | Neutral | Krippendorff’s alpha |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IE Covid-19 vaccination | 528 | 411 | 193 | 0.860 |
| IE Vaccination intent | 200 | 757 | 175 | 0.641 |
| IE Safety and side effects | 170 | 838 | 124 | 0.810 |
| UK Covid-19 vaccination | 1149 | 672 | 156 | 0.863 |
| UK Vaccination intent | 264 | 1523 | 190 | 0.727 |
| UK Safety and side effects | 498 | 1256 | 223 | 0.846 |
| US Covid-19 vaccination | 1973 | 1122 | 337 | 0.844 |
| US Vaccination intent | 419 | 2724 | 289 | 0.713 |
| US Safety and side effects | 826 | 2183 | 423 | 0.811 |
The three raters independently judged the relevance of each search query in our sample to each of the three categories. The inter-rater agreement (measured by Krippendorff’s alpha in table 2) indicates high agreement.
Table 3 shows that the classifiers achieved high precision as well as high recall when identifying queries related to each of the categories.
Table 3. Precision and recall scores for the classifiers
| Classifer | Precision | Recall |
|---|---|---|
| IE Covid-19 vaccination | 0.94 | 0.91 |
| IE Vaccination intent | 0.92 | 0.81 |
| IE Safety and side effects | 0.94 | 0.89 |
| UK Covid-19 vaccination | 0.98 | 0.96 |
| UK Vaccination intent | 0.84 | 0.8 |
| UK Safety and side effects | 0.87 | 0.90 |
| US Covid-19 vaccination | 0.96 | 0.94 |
| US Vaccination intent | 0.83 | 0.81 |
| US Safety and side effects | 0.87 | 0.89 |
To preserve user privacy, we use differential privacy which adds artificial noise to our data while enabling high quality results without identifying any individual person.
To further protect users’ privacy, we ensure that no personal information is included in the data, and we don’t link any related search-based inferences to an individual user.
To ensure accuracy after adding noise, we estimate the magnitude of change due to the noise. For the 3 main categories, we retain all the values that (after the addition of noise) have 80% probability to be within 15% of the original value and we remove the noisy values. This sometimes leads to missing data points, as explained in How we process the data section.
Because attributing searches to regions relies on general area estimation, we don’t report trends for regions smaller than 3sqkm.
You can learn more about the privacy and quality methods used to generate the data by reading this anonymization process description.
This data table can be found at the following locations:
- Processed file: vaccination-search-insights.csv
- Raw data: Global_vaccination_search_insights.csv
Other options to explore and work with the data include:
- Explore or download the data using our interactive dashboard.
- Run queries in Google Cloud’s COVID-19 Public Dataset Program.
- Analyze the data alongside other covariates in the COVID-19 Open-Data repository.
The data includes the following fields:
| Name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| date | string |
The first day of the week (starting on Monday) on which the searches took place. For example, in the weekly data the row labeled 2021-04-19 represents the search activity for the week of April 19 to April 25, 2021, inclusive. Calendar days start and end at midnight Pacific Standard Time, regardless of the region’s time zone. |
| country_region** | string |
The name of the country in English. For example, United States. |
| country_region_code** | string |
The ISO 3166-1 code for the country or region. For example, US or GB. |
| sub_region_1** | string |
The name of a region in the country. For example, Texas or Scotland. |
| sub_region_1_code** | string |
A country-specific ISO 3166-2 code for the region. For example, 06085. |
| sub_region_2** | string |
The name (or type) of a region in the country. Typically a subdivision of sub_region_1. For example, Santa Clara County or municipal_borough. |
| sub_region_2_code** | string |
In the US, the FIPS code for a US county (or equivalent). For example, 06085. |
| sub_region_3** | string |
The name (or type) of a region in the country. Typically a subdivision of sub_region_2. For example, Downtown or postal_code. |
| sub_region_3_code** | string |
In the US, the ZIP code. In the UK, post code district. For example, 94303 or E17. |
| place_id** | string |
The Google Place ID for the most-specific region, used in Google Places API and on Google Maps. For example, ChIJd_Y0eVIvkIARuQyDN0F1LBA |
| sni_covid19_vaccination | double |
The scaled normalized interest related to all COVID-19 vaccinations topics for the region and date. Empty when data isn’t available. For example, 87.02. Empty when data isn’t available. |
| sni_vaccination_intent | double |
The scaled normalized interest for all searches related to eligibility, availability, and accessibility for the region and date. Empty when data isn’t available. For example, 22.69. Empty when data isn’t available. |
| sni_safety_side_effects | double |
The scaled normalized interest related to safety and side effects of the vaccines for the region and date. For example, 17.96. Empty when data isn’t available. |
*Only available in the processed data table.
**Only available in the raw data table.
If you publish results based on this dataset, please cite as:
Google LLC "Google COVID-19 Vaccination Search Insights".
http://goo.gle/covid19vaccinationinsights, Accessed: <date>.
We’d love to hear about your project and learn more about your case studies. We’d also appreciate your feedback on the dashboard, data and documentation, or any unexpected results. Please email us at covid-19-search-trends-feedback@google.com.
Feb 24, 2022 - Added data for Ireland
Dec 20, 2021 - Added data for the United Kingdom
Jul 30, 2021 - Documented classifier training and evaluation, anonymization process and categories hierarchy.
Jun 30, 2021 - Public release