A Comparative Study
Liupu Wang1,2,3, PhD; Juexin Wang1, MS; Michael Wang4,
MD; Yong Li2, PhD; Yanchun Liang1, PhD; Dong Xu5, PhD
1Key Laboratory of Symbol Computation and Knowledge
Engineering of Ministry of Education, College of Computer
Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun, China
2School of Mathematics, Jilin University, Changchun, China
3Department of Computer Science and Christopher S. Bond
Life Sciences Center, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO,
United States
4Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences and Ellis
Fischel Cancer Center, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO,
United States
5Department of Computer Science, University of Missouri,
Columbia, MO, United States
Corresponding Author:
Dong Xu, PhD
Department of Computer Science
University of Missouri
201 Engineering Building West
Columbia, MO,
United States
Phone: 1 573 884 1887
Fax: 1 573 882 8318
Email: xudong [at] missouri.edu
ABSTRACT
Background: 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.
Objective: To compare major Internet search engines in their
usability of obtaining medical and health information.
Methods: 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.
Results: 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.
Conclusions: 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.
(J Med Internet Res 2012;14(3):e74)
doi:10.2196/jmir.1943
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