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Health Terms No Driving Force in Search Engines

Posted on: Wednesday, 5 November 2003, 06:00 CST

By Adam Marcus, HealthDay Reporter

HealthDayNews -- Despite earlier promises, the Internet may not be such a magnet for seekers of health information, a new study suggests.

Australian researchers found that important health terms like "herpes," "skin cancer," "weight loss," and "heart" lag well behind other, perhaps more frivolous, search-engine queries. Instead, Google and other software gofers spend the bulk of their time hunting for pornography, deals on computer gear, and the latest dirt on favorite celebrities.

Even after filtering out pornography, health term searches were the exception. They were less common than queries for weather, pets, tattoos, and horoscopes, the researchers say.

But some experts contend that search engines don't offer an accurate snapshot of Internet use, and many people are turning to the Web for health information.

The Australian findings appear as a research letter to the Nov. 5 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"These results challenge claims of high consumer demand for Internet-based health information," write the researchers, led by George Phillipov of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Health Service, in Woodville.

Some groups have estimated that as many as 80 percent of adults use the Internet for health-related queries. But a recent study by Stanford University researchers, also reported in the medical association journal, found that only 40 percent of people with Internet connections, or 20 percent of the total adult population, did so.

"The Internet is one of many tools, it's certainly not the only tool" for prospecting health information, says Laurence Baker, the Stanford researcher who led that study. "Some people will be enthusiastic users of it for health [purposes] and others will not."

Yet some experts disagree that search engines tell the full story of how people use the Internet.

Dr. Robert Wolfe of Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago says that people might devote fewer searches to health matters than their stock quotations. However, he adds, that doesn't mean they spend less time on health than other affairs.

"You might spend 3.5 minutes looking up movie times and one hour reading about genital herpes," says Wolfe, who has studied how Americans use the Internet to find health information.

And health information by its nature may lend itself less to "grazing" than news, baseball statistics, and the rest of all that's on the Web. "I think when [people are] looking for health information they have something specific in mind, the search is more focused, it's shorter," Wolfe says.

"It kind of makes sense that if you do a study of what's being searched at any one point in time, the number of health searches may be low," says Monique Levy, a health analyst for Jupiter Research, a New York City market research firm. Still, she says, at least half of Internet surfers use search engines to ferret out health information, and that number is higher when portal search bars -- those on sites like AOL and Earthlink, for example -- are included.

It is true, however, that running down health searches isn't the principal errand of search engines, Levy says. "If you look at all consumers and ask them what they've been doing online, only about 38 percent use the Web monthly or more frequently to find information on health. That's pretty low, but you don't have a health need all the time," she says.

Indeed, two-thirds of Web users say they're healthy or in good health but at risk of an illness, according to a new Jupiter survey. Roughly a fifth report having a chronic condition, like diabetes, arthritis, or other long-term ailments.

The Internet could be a valuable resource for people with chronic diseases, Levy says, but it hasn't worked out that way yet. "The Web has such great potential to manage chronic conditions. But getting people motivated is hard," she says.

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