What happens when your search engine is first to know you have cancer

This week researchers demonstrated that by analyzing a person's Web searches they could in some cases predict an upcoming diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Unlike traditional medical professionals, they have the advantage of access to a trove of data that Microsoft collects through its search engine, Bing. The Microsoft researchers identified Web users who had recently searched for queries indicating they have pancreatic cancer, such as "I was told I have pancreatic cancer, what to expect," and then looked back months earlier to examine patterns in the symptoms that the users searched for. This included phrases such as "dark or tarry stool," "abdominal swelling," "dark urine" and "yellowing skin." From this analysis they realized trends in the queries of users who were soon to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, identifying 5 to 15 percent of cases with low false-positive rates.