A web search methodology for health consumers

Abstract

Nowadays, many people use the World Wide Web to seek medical and health information but different users, such as providers (e.g., physicians) and consumers (e.g., patients), have different needs and bring different levels of reading ability and prior knowledge. Generic and specific search engines and specialized health sites either do not exploit the whole web or overload users with information. This creates difficulties mainly to consumers who often do not exactly know how to find the desired information. Thus, an information retrieval system for the web that ‘drives’ the user in finding the relevant information would be very beneficial. This paper describes a web search methodology for health consumers that help their research by classifying web pages on the basis of their level of health information and used language. We implemented such a methodology and carried out some experiments that show the effectiveness of our system when compared with the results carried out through human analysis