If you are a patient and you are having a side effect or suspicion that the medicine may be the cause of something please search it on google and other search engine

 by searching  you may be acting as an early warning

according to this  paper

Web-scale pharmacovigilance: listening to signals from the crowd

1. Ryen W White1, 
2. Nicholas P Tatonetti2, 
3. Nigam H Shah3, 
4. Russ B Altman4, 
5. Eric Horvitz1

+Author Affiliations

1. ¹Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington, USA
2. ²Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA
3. ³Department of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
4. ⁴Departments of Bioengineering and Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

1. Correspondence toDr Ryen W White, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA 98052, USA; ryenw@microsoft.com

• Received 9 November 2012
• Revised 8 January 2013
• Accepted 13 January 2013
• Published Online First 6 March 2013

Abstract

Adverse drug events cause substantial morbidity and mortality and are often discovered after a drug comes to market. We hypothesized that Internet users may provide early clues about adverse drug events via their online information-seeking. We conducted a large-scale study of Web search log data gathered during 2010. We pay particular attention to the specific drug pairing of paroxetine and pravastatin, whose interaction was reported to cause hyperglycemiaafter the time period of the online logs used in the analysis. We also examine sets of drug pairs known to be associated with hyperglycemia and those not associated with hyperglycemia. We find that anonymized signals on drug interactions can be mined from search logs. Compared to analyses of other sources such as electronic health records (EHR), logs are inexpensive to collect and mine. The results demonstrate that logs of the search activities of populations of computer users can contribute to drug safety surveillance