Weekly Pattern for Online Information Seeking on HIV - A Multi-Language Study.

Studies have demonstrated that there are weekly patterns of information-seeking activities on sexual health topics in some selected languages. However, it is not known if this weekly pattern is found across the ten most commonly-used languages on the Internet, and whether international public events might have an impact on these information-seeking patterns. The objective of this study is to examine sexual health information-seeking patterns for searches performed in several languages, and also to analyze the potential impact of public events on these information-seeking rates. We extracted the number of hits on the HIV article on Wikipedia for the ten most used languages on the Internet for all of the year 2015. The results confirm the existence of a weekly pattern for the searches performed in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, French, and German. But the weekly pattern was not found for searches in Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, and Malay. The number of HIV queries increased significantly during two public events, the World AIDS Day, and the announcement regarding the HIV-positive condition of the celebrity actor Charlie Sheen. The existence of higher peaks in searching rates at the beginning of the week for some languages, and the increase in queries related to public events could represent valuable opportunities for public campaigns promoting sexual health.