Most Web searches are not related to health, but with the "millions" of
total Web queries each day, health searches are not uncommon, according to a
research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Of all
health searches, researchers found that the most common ones sought
information on medicines, diets and specific medical organizations or health
care services.

Rather than looking at the most common keywords used in searches and
identifying those dealing with health, the researchers collected a sample of
nearly 300,000 Metacrawler search strings between February 2001 and April
2002. From these searches, a computer program randomly selected 1%, or 2,985
searches, and two physicians individually classified each one as
"health-related" or "non-health-related."

The doctors classified 94.7% of the searches as non-health-related and 3.6%
as health-related. Another 1.7% were classified differently by the two
researchers.

Although the study included only one search engine, the researchers "doubt
that the pattern of searches in other search engines would be different"
(Eysenbach/K?hler, JAMA, June 23/30).

From JAMA:
To the Editor: There is ongoing uncertainty about how often consumers use
the Internet to search for health-related information. For instance,
although a 2000 survey found that 55% of individuals with Internet access
have used the Web to find health or medical information,1 Phillipov and
Phillips2 reported that 17 health-related search terms they found in the
first 300 search terms of the Wordtracker Top 500 keyword report comprised
fewer than 1% of all queries. It is possible, however, that people may use
many different health-related keywords that are so rare that they never
appear on the Top 500 Keywords list. To address this, we analyzed a random
sample of search terms entered into a search engine over a longer period of
time.

Methods

We used the Metaspy Exposed Web site (http://www.metaspy.com/), which lists
10 unfiltered search strings people are currently entering on Metacrawler,
and which refreshes every . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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