What Search Trends Reveal About Responsible Gambling Awareness

Responsible gambling has become a hot topic this decade, with many crediting the COVID pandemic and the stay-at-home lockdowns it produced at the start of the 2020s for this. Yet, the reality is that most regulators were already looking into expanding their responsible gambling measures before the beginning of this decade, and one thing this field has always been short on is information.

People have always been ashamed to share that they use online casinos, digital poker rooms, and Internet sportsbooks for leisure, or just how much time they spend on these activities. The traditional means to measure gambling addiction rates, in the past, for the most part, have been calls made to helplines, and how many people enroll in self-exclusion schemes or rehab centers. Surveys have been handy, but many doubt the validity of such research, as again, many are embarrassed to admit they gamble too much, even if this is anonymous. Others are just in denial about how much they bet and how this affects them.

Enter search engine data. Yes, search engine data. You see, platforms like Google Trends are able to aggregate search queries, and this is something that has been utilized by top gambling portals like GamblingSites.com to figure out gambling help trends. 

For the non-SEO-savvy crowd, analyzing search patterns can provide insight into what billions of Google users worldwide are looking for on different topics. For gambling, this gives regulators and researchers data they previously did not have access to. It provides them with stats on how many people from distinct regions are diving into finding problem gambling info. This is something that can be used for policy creation.

Infodemiology in Modern Responsible Gaming Research

Some readers are not exactly sure what the phrase infodemiological means. It is a term used to define a science that analyzes health information in electronic media. Naturally, this is something that is relatively new, and the term Infodemiology was coined in the first few years of the 2000s by German-Canadian healthcare researcher Gunther Eysenbach.

Here, this word refers to the use of search engine data to understand a population’s relationship to gambling addiction. Without question, people are more honest with Google about their interests than anyone else, and using metrics like relative search volumes, monthly growth rates, and related queries can be super beneficial in discovering useful links that can lead to understandings that can help regulators better tackle curbing problem gambling rates from going up.

Searches like gambling disorder, gambling treatment, gambling diagnosis, gambling issue, betting too much, uncontrollable wagering, and so on, in high volume for people in a specific territory point to an upward trajectory in gambling-related harm there. Once that becomes obvious to regulators, they must conduct surveys to verify this, and if these yield the same results, the appropriate action must be taken.

How Search Data Should Help Mold RG Policy 

Google Trends can show regulators and other interested parties what individuals search for, for example, phrases like gambling help, spiking in a particular area after the debut of a major gaming establishment, or the launch of an online casino/sportsbook open to residents. They can see correlations between gambling availability and potential gambling harm.

Such conclusions, meaning gambling harm searches going up in given areas, can initiate responsible gambling campaigns that target such hotspots, raising awareness about this issue there. It can also contribute to local authorities in those territories expanding treatment capacity, which may be needed quickly, as the more people are searching gambling harm resources, the higher the likelihood of many of these either already showing signs of addiction, or developing it soon.

Accordingly, following through on the insights provided via this method shifts regulatory posture. Regulators do not have to wait around until problems are clear and documented through traditional means before they react. Nor should they. Moreover, when a country or state/province passes new laws or restrictions of any kind, including advertising ones, it can turn to search volume data to see if these have had any effects.

Unlike surveys, which require long periods not only to be run and analyzed, but also designed, this is a quick and simple way to see effects in near-real-time, which then lets regulators quickly adjust their policies and rules if needed. For gambling advertising measures, this is vital, as searches for promotional offers and major campaigns can also get tracked after novel measures are passed to see just how effective the restrictions are. Do they work in practice?

The Limitations of Using Search Data for RG Policy-Creation

Despite all the promise of practicality this method presents, it is still an imperfect tool. The data is often relative, not absolute, meaning you do not get a total query count, but a percentage increase. While still good data, this does not tell you how many searches actually occurred, and makes cross-jurisdictional comparisons hard. This is so because a higher relative search volume in one place will not reflect a higher search presence in another. Just a higher demand.

There is also a problem with Google Trends’ sampling, as it uses a total search dataset. It does not analyze each query and injects statistical noise, which it does to protect users. Moreover, it cannot tell which users are using VPN services, meaning they are masking their IP. A growing number of people utilize VPNs nowadays, and this can really skew the presented data.

There is also the issue that not everyone uses Google to search the Web. Privacy-oriented people fancy DuckDuckGo, while Bing has its fans as well. Furthermore, residents of some regions also prefer local engines.

As many are aware, correlation does not equal causation. A spike in some search terms does not immediately reflect increased harm potential. It could be spurred on by a number of different things, like a quality public health campaign, or something going on in the news. Another thing that many are not wise to is that the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA constrain analysis of gambling-related searches, legally. Regulators who adhere to these regulations can only rely on aggregated, anonymized metrics. There is also the concern that the use of this data could normalize surveillance-based governance, which many people justifiably fear nowadays.