Title: User experience evaluation of Google search for obtaining medical knowledge: a case study

Authors: Liupu Wang; Juexin Wang; Michael Wang; Yanchun Liang; Dong Xu

Addresses: College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China; School of Mathematics, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China; Department of Computer Science, and Christopher S. Bond Life Sciences Center, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA. ' College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China. ' Ellis Fischel Cancer Center, Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences, University of Missouri School of Medicine, Columbia, MO 62503, USA. ' Key Laboratory of Symbol Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry Education, College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China. ' Department of Computer Science and Christopher S. Bond Life Sciences Center, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA; College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China

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.

Keywords: internet search; page ranking; Google; medical information; health information; breast cancer; SNOMED; user experience evaluation; usability testing; Hallway testing; software engineering; information retrieval; search engines; disease information; treatment information; health websites.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDMB.2011.045414

International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, 2011 Vol.5 No.6, pp.626 - 639

Received: 04 Oct 2009
Accepted: 04 Feb 2010
Published online: 24 Jan 2015 *

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