Wang Liupu, Wang Juexin, Wang Michael, Li Yong, Liang Yanchun, Xu Dong
Key Laboratory of Symbol Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun, China.
J Med Internet Res. 2012 May 16;14(3):e74. doi: 10.2196/jmir.1943.
The Internet has become one of the most important means to obtain health and medical information. It is often the first step in checking for basic information about a disease and its treatment. The search results are often useful to general users. Various search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com can play an important role in obtaining medical information for both medical professionals and lay people. However, the usability and effectiveness of various search engines for medical information have not been comprehensively compared and evaluated.
To compare major Internet search engines in their usability of obtaining medical and health information.
We applied usability testing as a software engineering technique and a standard industry practice to compare the four major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com) in obtaining health and medical information. For this purpose, we searched the keyword breast cancer in Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com and saved the results of the top 200 links from each search engine. We combined nonredundant links from the four search engines and gave them to volunteer users in an alphabetical order. The volunteer users evaluated the websites and scored each website from 0 to 10 (lowest to highest) based on the usefulness of the content relevant to breast cancer. A medical expert identified six well-known websites related to breast cancer in advance as standards. We also used five keywords associated with breast cancer defined in the latest release of Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) and analyzed their occurrence in the websites.
Each search engine provided rich information related to breast cancer in the search results. All six standard websites were among the top 30 in search results of all four search engines. Google had the best search validity (in terms of whether a website could be opened), followed by Bing, Ask.com, and Yahoo!. The search results highly overlapped between the search engines, and the overlap between any two search engines was about half or more. On the other hand, each search engine emphasized various types of content differently. In terms of user satisfaction analysis, volunteer users scored Bing the highest for its usefulness, followed by Yahoo!, Google, and Ask.com.
Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com are by and large effective search engines for helping lay users get health and medical information. Nevertheless, the current ranking methods have some pitfalls and there is room for improvement to help users get more accurate and useful information. We suggest that search engine users explore multiple search engines to search different types of health information and medical knowledge for their own needs and get a professional consultation if necessary.
互联网已成为获取健康和医疗信息的最重要手段之一。它通常是查询疾病及其治疗基本信息的第一步。搜索结果对普通用户往往很有用。谷歌、雅虎、必应和Ask.com等各种搜索引擎在为医学专业人员和普通民众获取医疗信息方面都能发挥重要作用。然而，各种搜索引擎在获取医疗信息方面的可用性和有效性尚未得到全面比较和评估。
比较各大互联网搜索引擎在获取健康和医疗信息方面的可用性。
我们将可用性测试作为一种软件工程技术和标准行业实践，来比较四大搜索引擎（谷歌、雅虎、必应和Ask.com）在获取健康和医疗信息方面的表现。为此，我们在谷歌、雅虎、必应和Ask.com中搜索关键词“乳腺癌”，并保存每个搜索引擎前200个链接的结果。我们整合了来自四大搜索引擎的非重复链接，并按字母顺序将它们提供给志愿者用户。志愿者用户对网站进行评估，并根据与乳腺癌相关内容的有用性，为每个网站从0到10分（最低到最高）打分。一位医学专家提前确定了六个与乳腺癌相关的知名网站作为标准。我们还使用了最新版医学系统命名法-临床术语（SNOMED CT）中定义的五个与乳腺癌相关的关键词，并分析了它们在网站中的出现情况。
每个搜索引擎在搜索结果中都提供了与乳腺癌相关的丰富信息。所有六个标准网站都在四大搜索引擎的搜索结果前30名之中。谷歌在搜索有效性方面（就网站是否能打开而言）表现最佳，其次是必应、Ask.com和雅虎。各搜索引擎的搜索结果高度重叠，任意两个搜索引擎之间的重叠率约为一半或更高。另一方面，每个搜索引擎对各类内容的强调有所不同。在用户满意度分析方面，志愿者用户认为必应的有用性得分最高，其次是雅虎、谷歌和Ask.com。
谷歌、雅虎、必应和Ask.com总体上都是有效的搜索引擎，可帮助普通用户获取健康和医疗信息。然而，当前的排名方法存在一些缺陷，仍有改进空间，以帮助用户获得更准确、有用的信息。我们建议搜索引擎用户根据自身需求，探索多个搜索引擎来搜索不同类型的健康信息和医学知识，必要时寻求专业咨询。
