title: Assessment of the malnutrition related information on the internet.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Technological development has made the health information easily accessible to the general community through the internet. The number of health information seekers is increasing gradually and there is sufficient evidence indicating its usefulness in informed decision making. The objective of the study is to evaluate the quality of malnutrition related information on the internet by using different search engines.
  
  
  METHODS
  The three search engines: Google, MSN/Bing, and Yahoo were used to search malnutrition related information. The general assessment tool and content assessment tool were adopted to evaluate the quality of the included websites from different groups such as .org, .com, .gov, and others. The analysis was performed by using SPSS 17.0.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Of all 29 sites, the .gov group showed the highest score for general assessment (mean=317; SD=14.68) and content assessment (mean=51.5; SD=18.26). The .org group got the lowest scores for both the tools. Reliability was 57% among rater1 and rater2 for the general assessment tool while it was 51% between rater2 and rater3 for content assessment.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The study produced a quality assessment of websites containing malnutrition information. Sites provided more information on etiology, clinical information, and available treatment option for malnutrition. Assessment tools that were used in the study were good, extensive in assessing both surface and content quality.
authors.affiliation: Asian Institute of Public Health, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India.
authors.forename: Nishitha R
authors.initials: NR
authors.lastname: Dash
authors.forename: Kumkum
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Pipal
authors.forename: Santhosh K
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Kaza
authors.forename: Pinaki
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Panigrahi
authors.forename: Ashish
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Joshi
mesh_terms: D054626:Consumer Health Information / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D044342:Malnutrition; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D057386:Search Engine