Comparative evaluation of web search engines in health information retrieval

2011 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
pp. 869-892 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Teixeira Lopes ◽  
Cristina Ribeiro
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
Health Information ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
Comparative Evaluation ◽  
Web Search ◽  
Web Search Engines

World Wide Web Search Engines

2011 ◽  
pp. 155-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wen-Chen Hu ◽  
Jyh-Haw Yeh
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
World Wide Web ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Web Search ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Structural Style ◽  
Future Research Directions ◽  
Web Search Engines ◽  
Almost All

The World Wide Web now holds more than 800 million pages covering almost all issues. The Web’s fast growing size and lack of structural style present a new challenge for information retrieval. Numerous search technologies have been applied to Web search engines; however, the dominant search method has yet to be identified. This chapter provides an overview of the existing technologies for Web search engines and classifies them into six categories: 1) hyperlink exploration, 2) information retrieval, 3) metasearches, 4) SQL approaches, 5) content-based multimedia searches, and 6) others. At the end of this chapter, a comparative study of major commercial and experimental search engines is presented, and some future research directions for Web search engines are suggested.

Enhancing Web Search through Query Expansion

2011 ◽  
pp. 752-757 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Crabtree
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
Query Expansion ◽  
Web Search ◽  
User Involvement ◽  
Semantic Knowledge ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
Search Performance ◽  
Interactive Query ◽  
Web Search Engines

Web search engines help users find relevant web pages by returning a result set containing the pages that best match the user’s query. When the identified pages have low relevance, the query must be refined to capture the search goal more effectively. However, finding appropriate refinement terms is difficult and time consuming for users, so researchers developed query expansion approaches to identify refinement terms automatically. There are two broad approaches to query expansion, automatic query expansion (AQE) and interactive query expansion (IQE) (Ruthven et al., 2003). AQE has no user involvement, which is simpler for the user, but limits its performance. IQE has user involvement, which is more complex for the user, but means it can tackle more problems such as ambiguous queries. Searches fail by finding too many irrelevant pages (low precision) or by finding too few relevant pages (low recall). AQE has a long history in the field of information retrieval, where the focus has been on improving recall (Velez et al., 1997). Unfortunately, AQE often decreased precision as the terms used to expand a query often changed the query’s meaning (Croft and Harper (1979) identified this effect and named it query drift). The problem is that users typically consider just the first few results (Jansen et al., 2005), which makes precision vital to web search performance. In contrast, IQE has historically balanced precision and recall, leading to an earlier uptake within web search. However, like AQE, the precision of IQE approaches needs improvement. Most recently, approaches have started to improve precision by incorporating semantic knowledge.

World Wide Web Search Technologies

2005 ◽  
pp. 3111-3117
Author(s):  
Wen-Chen Hu ◽  
Hung-Jen Yang ◽  
Jyh-haw Yeh ◽  
Chung-wei Lee
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
World Wide Web ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Web Search ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
Future Research Directions ◽  
Web Search Engines ◽  
Almost All

The World Wide Web now holds more than six billion pages covering almost all daily issues. The Web’s fast growing size and lack of structural style present a new challenge for information retrieval (Lawrence & Giles, 1999a). Traditional search techniques are based on users typing in search keywords which the search services can then use to locate the desired Web pages. However, this approach normally retrieves too many documents, of which only a small fraction are relevant to the users’ needs. Furthermore, the most relevant documents do not necessarily appear at the top of the query output list. Numerous search technologies have been applied to Web search engines; however, the dominant search methods have yet to be identified. This article provides an overview of the existing technologies for Web search engines and classifies them into six categories: i) hyperlink exploration, ii) information retrieval, iii) metasearches, iv) SQL approaches, v) content-based multimedia searches, and vi) others. At the end of this article, a comparative study of major commercial and experimental search engines is presented, and some future research directions for Web search engines are suggested. Related Web search technology review can also be found in Arasu, Cho, Garcia-Molina, Paepcke, and Raghavan (2001) and Lawrence and Giles (1999b).

scholarly journals The Association Between Health Information Seeking on the Internet and Physician Visits (The Seventh Tromsø Study - Part 4): Population-Based Questionnaire Study (Preprint)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kassaye Yitbarek Yigzaw ◽  
Rolf Wynn ◽  
Luis Marco-Ruiz ◽  
Andrius Budrionis ◽  
Sunday Oluwafemi Oyeyemi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Health Information ◽  
Search Engines ◽  
Information Seeking ◽  
Health Care Services ◽  
Web Search ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Health Information Seeking ◽  
Physician Visits ◽  
Web Search Engines

BACKGROUND The internet is being widely used for seeking health information. However, there is no consensus on the association between health information seeking on the internet and the use of health care services. OBJECTIVE We examined the association between health information seeking via the internet and physician visits. In addition, we investigated the association between online health information seeking and the decisions to visit and not to visit a physician. METHODS We used the cross-sectional electronic health (eHealth) data of 18,197 participants from the seventh survey of the Tromsø Study (Tromsø 7). The participants were aged ≥40 years and living in Tromsø, Norway. We used logistic regression models to examine the association between online health information seeking and physician visits, the decision to visit a physician, and the decision not to visit a physician, with adjustment for the demographic status, socioeconomic status, and health status of the participants. RESULTS The use of Web search engines was associated with a physician visit. However, the association was moderated by age, and the OR decreased as age increased. The ORs for the use of Web search engines were 1.99 (95% CI 1.94-2.02) and 1.07 (95% CI 1.03-1.12) at ages 40 and 80 years, respectively. The decision to visit a physician was associated with the use of Web search engines (OR 2.95, 95% CI 2.03-4.46), video search engines (OR 1.43, 95% CI 1.21-1.70), and health apps (OR 1.26, 95% CI 1.13-1.42). The association between social media use and the decision to visit a physician was moderated by gender. Women who used social media had 1.42 (95% CI 1.31-1.55) times higher odds of deciding to visit a physician, whereas the decision to visit a physician was not different between men who used social media and those who did not use social media. Conversely, the decision not to visit a physician was associated with the use of Web search engines (OR 2.78, 95% CI 1.92-4.18), video search engines (OR 1.27, 95% CI 1.07-1.51), social media (OR 1.28, 95% CI 1.10-1.49), and health apps (OR 1.20, 95% CI 1.07-1.35). CONCLUSIONS Health information found on the internet was positively associated with both the decision to visit a physician and the decision not to visit a physician. However, the association of health information seeking with the decision to visit a physician was slightly stronger than the association with the decision not to visit a physician. This could imply that the use of eHealth services is associated with a resultant increase in physician visits. In summary, our findings suggest that the internet serves as a supplement to health care services rather than as a replacement.

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