色情视频

The Oxford Dictionaries selected 鈥渧ape鈥濃�攁s in, to smoke from an electronic cigarette鈥攁s word of the year in 2014. It turns out that Internet users鈥� search behavior reflects the word's popularity. Between 2009 and 2015, the number of people in the United States seeking information online about vaping rose dramatically, co-led by 色情视频 Internet health expert John W. Ayers and University of North Carolina tobacco control expert Rebecca S. Williams as a part of the .

One finding from the study of particular concern to health officials and researchers is that when it comes to vaping, people are by and large searching for information on how and where to get vaping products, not for information on quitting cigarette smoking or the health effects of vaping.

E-cigarettes and other hand-held vaporizers began appearing on American shelves in the mid-2000s. Since then, they鈥檝e quickly risen in popularity while regulators have been slow to adapt smoking legislation to account for these devices.

鈥淏ig Tobacco has largely taken over the e-cigarette industry. Alongside unchecked marketing and advertising, e-cigarettes have exploded online,鈥� Ayers said.

Smoke signals

Internet users鈥� search history bears this out. Ayers, Williams, and a team of colleagues from across the country examined search history from Google Trends, which includes statistics on what specific words people searched for, the search term鈥檚 popularity relative to all other concurrent searches in a specified time, date and geographic location. From this data, the researchers can find patterns that point to Internet searchers鈥� apparent preferences and attitudes.

When they looked at searches related to e-cigarettes starting in 2009, they found a sharply rising trend through 2015 with no end in sight. For example, in 2014 there were about 8.5 million e-cigarette鈥搑elated Google searches. For 2015, their model forecasts an increase in these searchers of about 62-percent.

Looking at geographic data, they found that e-cigarette searches have diffused across the nation, suggesting that e-cigarettes have become a widespread cultural phenomenon in every U.S. state. Over the same time period, searches for e-cigarettes far outpaced other 鈥渟moking alternatives鈥� such as snus (smokeless tobacco) or nicotine gum or patches. The researchers published their findings today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Buying behavior

What most concerns the researchers, though, is that when people search for e-cigarette information, they鈥檙e using search terms like: 鈥渂est e-cig,鈥� 鈥渂uy vapes鈥� or 鈥渟hop vaping.鈥�

鈥淥ne of the most surprising findings of this study was that searches for where to buy e-cigarettes outpaced searches about health concerns or smoking cessation,鈥� said Williams said. 鈥淒espite what the media and e-cigarette industry might have you believe, there is little research evidence to support the notion that e-cigarettes are safe or an effective tool to help smokers quit. Given that, we think it鈥檚 revealing that there were fewer searches about safety and cessation topics than about shopping.鈥�

In fact, she said, searches for e-cigarette safety concerns represented less than 1 percent of e-cigarette searches, and this number has declined over the past two years.

A linguistic trend also emerged from the study. The term 鈥渧aping鈥� is has quickly overtaken 鈥渆-cigarettes鈥� as the preferred nomenclature in the United States. That鈥檚 important for health officials and researchers to recognize, the team noted. Surveillance of smoking trends is done primarily through surveys and questionnaires, and knowing which terms people use can affect the accuracy of this data.

Also, one of the major weapons anti-smoking advocacy groups have is counter-advertising. In the Internet age, advertisers look for specific keywords to target their advertisements. Knowing that more people use the term 鈥渧aping鈥� than 鈥渆-cig鈥� helps them be more targeted and effective, Ayers said.

鈥淟abels do matter,鈥� Ayers said. 鈥淲hen you call it 鈥榲aping,鈥� you鈥檙e using a brand new word that doesn鈥檛 have the same historical baggage as 鈥榮moking鈥� or 鈥榗igarette.鈥� They鈥檝e relabeled it. Health campaigns need to recognize this so they can keep up.鈥�

Additional collaborators on this study included: Benjamin Althouse of the Santa Fe Institute; Jon-Patrick Allem of the University of Southern California; Eric C. Leas of the University of California, San Diego; and Mark Dredze of Johns Hopkins University.

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