Exploring the distribution of online healthcare information

Motivated by the importance of retrieving comprehensive healthcare information, we analyzed how information about 12 concepts related to a widely available healthcare topic is distributed across 145 high-quality webpages. The analysis reveals that the distribution of the concepts follows a power law where a few pages contain many concepts, while the majority contains less than half the concepts. The analysis also reveals the existence of general, specialized, and sparse pages, in addition to the large number of pages that users must visit before they have access to all the concepts. These results provide insights into expert search procedures, and motivate the design of future search systems that guide users in the retrieval of comprehensive information. Keywords Healthcare, web searching, distribution of information.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Suresh K. Bhavnani, Renju T. Jacob, Jennifer Nardine, Frederick A. Peck
• Keywords: Available Healthcare Topic, CHI 2003, Comprehensive Healthcare Information, Expert Search Procedures, Human Computer Interaction