p2pnet news view | P2P:- When your eyes start going in different directions after 12-hours of solid surfing, do you click over to your favourite search engine to find out what kind of exotic disease you may have virtually picked up?

You do? Then you’re probably a Cyberchondriac.

At least, that’s how you might be classified by Microsoft researchers Ryen White and Eric Horvitz.

“The World Wide Web provides an abundant source of medical information,” they say in their paper, Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search.

Written to, “assist people who are not healthcare professionals to better understand health and disease, and to provide them with feasible explanations for symptoms,” it’s a 33-page study of findings from a, “log-based study of anonymized data about online searches for medical information drawn from a large set of data on Web search behavior shared voluntarily by a large number of users of Web search engines,” say the authors, going on »»»

We focus particularly on how the input of search terms that describe common symptoms can lead to a shift of focus of attention to serious illnesses—illnesses that are rarely the cause of such common complaints. We supplement the log analysis where appropriate with findings from a survey of 515 individuals’ health-related search experiences. Our study’s log-based methodology lets us examine at scale how people interact with medical information and represents an exploratory, initial step toward understanding cyberchondria.

White and Horvitz say they studied the health-related search experiences of 515 people, focusing on, “the extent to which common, likely innocuous symptoms can escalate into the review of content on serious, rare conditions that are linked to the common symptoms”.

The results?

Web search engines, “have the potential to escalate medical concerns,” they stay, adding:

“We show that escalation is influenced by the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users, the presence of escalatory terminology in pages visited, and a user’s predisposition to escalate versus to seek more reasonable explanations for ailments.

“We also demonstrate the persistence of post-session anxiety following escalations and the effect that such anxieties can have on interrupting user’s activities across multiple sessions. Our findings underscore the potential costs and challenges of cyberchondria and suggest actionable design implications that hold opportunity for improving the search and navigation experience for people turning to the Web to interpret common symptoms.”

Personally, we think ‘webochondriac’ is better.

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Microsoft – Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search, November, 2008

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 3:51 pm and is filed under P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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