The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine
WWW7 Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web 7
Finding information on the World Wide Web: the retrieval effectiveness of search engines
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
The technology acceptance model and the World Wide Web
Decision Support Systems
Indicators of accuracy for answers to ready reference questions on the internet
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Decision Support Systems
On linear mixture of expert approaches to information retrieval
Decision Support Systems
INFORMS Journal on Computing
User Expectations and Rankings of Quality Factors in Different Web Site Domains
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
Trust and TAM in online shopping: an integrated model
MIS Quarterly
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Consumers are increasingly searching for health information online and using that information to inform their decisions and behavior. Because the negative consequences of basing decisions on inaccurate or untrustworthy health information may be particularly serious, it is important to understand the quality of online health information. This study empirically investigates the quality of health information that is returned by popular search engines when queried using a large, comprehensive set of health-related search terms. Findings indicate that a majority of such information returned by popular search engines is of a high quality but quality levels vary across different health topic areas. In particular, searches for terms related to preventive health and social health issues tend to produce lower quality results than terms related to diagnosis and treatment of physical disease or injury. While the overall prevalence of high quality information is greater than that of low quality, the observed variance across health-related terms has important implications for consumers, policy makers, health information providers, and search engines.