Koo Malcolm, Skinner Harvey
Department of Public Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, McMurrich Building, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A8, Canada.
J Med Internet Res. 2003 Nov 14;5(4):e28. doi: 10.2196/jmir.5.4.e28.
The Web has become an important and influential source of health information. With the vast number of Web sites on the Internet, users often resort to popular search sites when searching for information. However, little is known about the characteristics of Web sites returned by simple Web searches for information about smoking cessation for teenagers.
To determine the characteristics of Web sites retrieved by search engines about smoking cessation for teenagers and how information quality correlates with the search ranking.
The top 30 sites returned by 4 popular search sites in response to the search terms "teen quit smoking" were examined. The information relevance and quality characteristics of these sites were evaluated by 2 raters. Objective site characteristics were obtained using a page-analysis Web site.
Only 14 of the 30 Web sites are of direct relevance to smoking cessation for teenagers. The readability of about two-thirds of the 14 sites is below an eighth-grade school level and they ranked significantly higher (Kendall rank correlation, tau = -0.39, P =.05) in search-site results than sites with readability above or equal to that grade level. Sites that ranked higher were significantly associated with the presence of e-mail address for contact (tau = -0.46, P =.01), annotated hyperlinks to external sites (tau = -0.39, P =.04), and the presence of meta description tag (tau = -0.48, P =.002). The median link density (number of external sites that have a link to that site) of the Web pages was 6 and the maximum was 735. A higher link density was significantly associated with a higher rank (tau = -0.58, P =.02).
Using simple search terms on popular search sites to look for information on smoking cessation for teenagers resulted in less than half of the sites being of direct relevance. To improve search efficiency, users could supplement results obtained from simple Web searches with human-maintained Web directories and learn to refine their searches with more advanced search syntax.
网络已成为健康信息的重要且有影响力的来源。由于互联网上存在大量网站，用户在搜索信息时常常求助于热门搜索网站。然而，对于通过简单网络搜索获取的青少年戒烟信息网站的特点，人们了解甚少。
确定搜索引擎检索到的青少年戒烟相关网站的特点，以及信息质量与搜索排名之间的关联。
检查了4个热门搜索网站针对搜索词“青少年戒烟”返回的前30个网站。由两名评估者对这些网站的信息相关性和质量特征进行评估。使用网页分析网站获取客观的网站特征。
30个网站中只有14个与青少年戒烟直接相关。这14个网站中约三分之二的可读性低于八年级学校水平，并且在搜索网站结果中的排名显著高于可读性达到或高于该年级水平的网站（肯德尔等级相关性，tau = -0.39，P = 0.05）。排名较高的网站与存在用于联系的电子邮件地址（tau = -0.46，P = 0.01）、指向外部网站的带注释超链接（tau = -0.39，P = 0.04）以及存在元描述标签（tau = -0.48，P = 0.002）显著相关。网页的平均链接密度（指向该网站的外部网站数量）为6，最大值为735。较高的链接密度与较高的排名显著相关（tau = -0.58，P = 0.02）。
在热门搜索网站上使用简单搜索词查找青少年戒烟信息，结果显示不到一半的网站与主题直接相关。为提高搜索效率，用户可以用人为维护的网站目录补充简单网络搜索的结果，并学会使用更高级的搜索语法优化搜索。
