Health-Related Searches on the Internet

Abstract

To the Editor: There is ongoing uncertainty about how often consumers use the Internet to search for health-related information. For instance, although a 2000 survey found that 55% of individuals with Internet access have used the Web to find health or medical information,¹ Phillipov and Phillips² reported that 17 health-related search terms they found in the first 300 search terms of the Wordtracker Top 500 keyword report comprised fewer than 1% of all queries. It is possible, however, that people may use many different health-related keywords that are so rare that they never appear on the Top 500 Keywords list. To address this, we analyzed a random sample of search terms entered into a search engine over a longer period of time.