Domain-specific search strategies for the effective retrieval of healthcare and shopping information
CHI '02 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Exploring the distribution of online healthcare information
CHI '03 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The effects of domain knowledge on search tactic formulation
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
A diary study of task switching and interruptions
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Trust and mistrust of online health sites
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Analysis of topic dynamics in web search
WWW '05 Special interest tracks and posters of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web
Accurately interpreting clickthrough data as implicit feedback
Proceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Query chains: learning to rank from implicit feedback
Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery in data mining
Improving web search ranking by incorporating user behavior information
SIGIR '06 Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Disruption and recovery of computing tasks: field study, analysis, and directions
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Investigating behavioral variability in web search
Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
MedSearch: a specialized search engine for medical information
Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
Models of searching and browsing: languages, studies, and applications
IJCAI'07 Proceedings of the 20th international joint conference on Artifical intelligence
Predicting escalations of medical queries based on web page structure and content
Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Intelligent personal health record: experience and open issues
Proceedings of the 1st ACM International Health Informatics Symposium
Use of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in Portuguese for categorizing web-based healthcare content
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Intentions and attention in exploratory health search
Proceedings of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in Information Retrieval
Understanding the potential for collaborative search technologies in clinical settings
Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Collaborative information retrieval
Algorithmic and user study of an autocompletion algorithm on a large medical vocabulary
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Building the trail best traveled: effects of domain knowledge on web search trailblazing
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Predicting epidemic tendency through search behavior analysis
IJCAI'11 Proceedings of the Twenty-Second international joint conference on Artificial Intelligence - Volume Volume Three
Studies of the onset and persistence of medical concerns in search logs
SIGIR '12 Proceedings of the 35th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Medical information retrieval: an instance of domain-specific search
SIGIR '12 Proceedings of the 35th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Detecting Fake Medical Web Sites Using Recursive Trust Labeling
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
The Paradox of the Health Commons: The Benefits and Trouble about Participation and Co-Creation
International Journal of Organizational and Collective Intelligence
The presentation of health-related search results and its impact on negative emotional outcomes
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Beliefs and biases in web search
Proceedings of the 36th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Workshop on health search and discovery: helping users and advancing medicine
Proceedings of the 36th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Captions and biases in diagnostic search
ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB)
Report on the SIGIR 2013 workshop on health search and discovery
ACM SIGIR Forum
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The World Wide Web provides an abundant source of medical information. This information can assist people who are not healthcare professionals to better understand health and illness, and to provide them with feasible explanations for symptoms. However, the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure. We use the term cyberchondria to refer to the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web. We performed a large-scale, longitudinal, log-based study of how people search for medical information online, supported by a survey of 515 individuals' health-related search experiences. We focused on the extent to which common, likely innocuous symptoms can escalate into the review of content on serious, rare conditions that are linked to the common symptoms. Our results show that Web search engines have the potential to escalate medical concerns. We show that escalation is associated with the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users, the presence of escalatory terminology in pages visited, and a user's predisposition to escalate versus to seek more reasonable explanations for ailments. We also demonstrate the persistence of postsession anxiety following escalations and the effect that such anxieties can have on interrupting user's activities across multiple sessions. Our findings underscore the potential costs and challenges of cyberchondria and suggest actionable design implications that hold opportunity for improving the search and navigation experience for people turning to the Web to interpret common symptoms.