title: Use experience evaluation of Google search for obtaining medical knowledge: a case study.
abstract: More and more people use internet search engines, especially Google, to learn about diseases and possible treatments. We conducted a hallway testing to evaluate the effectiveness of Google in obtaining medical information. We searched 'Breast Cancer' using Google. Six volunteers scored their experience for each of the top 500 websites. Our study shows that 50 hits of Google often help lay users in getting medical information, but some highly useful websites may be buried beyond top 200. Hence, the specificity of using Google in searching for medical information is satisfactory while the sensitivity of the search has significant room for improvement.
authors.affiliation: College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun, China. sevenocean@163.com
authors.forename: Liupu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Juexin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Yanchun
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.forename: Dong
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Xu
mesh_terms: D006266:Health Education; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination / Q000379:methods*; D007255:Information Services / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D020407:Internet; D057386:Search Engine