January was cervical cancer awareness month and as a result searches for cervical cancer and related terms increased by 116% during the month. Although cervical cancer was not the most searched for type of cancer during January, the chart below shows that it did overtake searches for skin cancer, and saw the biggest percentage uplift during the month.

Digging a little deeper into the search data, one of the emerging trends was a stark increase in searches for HPV during January. I must admit, I had never heard of HPV before today, so like most people I went to Wikipedia to find out. In fact, in the four weeks ending 29 January, 37% of all searches for ‘hpv’ ended up with a visit to Wikipedia.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a skin infection that can lead to genital warts or in severe cases, cancer. The search term variations over the four weeks ending 29 January show that the top HPV search terms are ‘hpv’, ‘hpv virus’ and ‘hpv symptoms’.

Charting the top three search terms just goes to show how popular the topic was in January. Searches for each term peaked for the week ending 15 January, which saw a 325% uplift in searches for ‘hpv’, a 700% uplift in searches for ‘hpv virus’ and a 400% uplift in searches for ‘hpv symptoms’.

Looking back at the downstream websites receiving traffic from the search term ‘hpv’ you’ll notice that BBC News and BBC iPlayer were both in the top 10. As one of the most popular websites in the UK, it’s not unusual for BBC News to receive traffic for a subject like this, but I was initially surprised to find iPlayer in the list. A quick scan through the BBC site cleared up this mystery. As it turns out, Jaime Winstone took part in a BBC Three documentary in mid January which was made available on iPlayer all about HPV and sexual health, a short extract of which I have included below.

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