RESEARCH ARTICLE Web-Based Surveillance of Public Information Needs for Informing Preconception Interventions

Background The risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes can be minimized through the adoption of healthy lifestyles before pregnancy by women of childbearing age. Initiatives for promotion of pre-conception health may be difficult to implement. Internet can be used to build tailored health interventions through identification of the public's information needs. To this aim, we devel-oped a semi-automatic web-based system for monitoring Google searches, web pages and activity on social networks, regarding preconception health. Methods Based on the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists guidelines and on the actual search behaviors of Italian Internet users, we defined a set of keywords targeting pre-conception care topics. Using these keywords, we analyzed the usage of Google search en-gine and identified web pages containing preconception care recommendations. We also monitored how the selected web pages were shared on social networks. We analyzed dis-crepancies between searched and published information and the sharing pattern of th