Quality of health-related online search results》.pdf

Decision Support Systems 57 (2014) 454–462 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Decision Support Systems journal homepage: /l ocate/dss Quality of health-related online search results Brent Kitchens a,⁎, Christopher A. Harle a, Shengli Li b a University of Florida, United States b Xian Jiaotong University, China a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Available online 6 November 2012 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 Keywords: untrustworthy health information may be particularly serious, it is important to understand the quality of on- Health search line health information. This study empirically investigates the quality of health information that is returned Online information quality by popular search engines when queried using a large, comprehensive set of health-related search terms. Online medical information Findings indicate that a majority of such information returned by popular search engines is of a high quality Health website quality Search quality but quality levels vary across different health topic areas. In particular, searches for terms related to preven- tive health and social health issues tend to produce lower quality results than te