The Psychological Impact of the Internet as a Source of Health Information

The internet is a source of health information for people in the digital age. By seeking health information through the internet, information seekers can seek the health information they need quickly and widely. In addition to the positive impact, the internet as a source of health information also has a negative impact on the seeker of information. The purpose of this article is to reveal the negative impact of utilizing the internet as a source of health information in the form of psychological impact. The method used is literature review. The findings of this article are that the internet has a psychological impact in the form of health anxiety. Information seekers who suffer from health anxiety tend to shut themselves off from people, lose concentration at work or study, withdraw from pleasant things, have poor relationships with health experts, drain money, and often feel anxiety symptoms. In response to this problem, information seekers need to equip themselves with digital literacy skills

Evaluating the Ability of Commercial Search Engines to Help People Answer Health Questions

The act of seeking information pertaining to medical treatments and self-diagnosis is one of the applications of search engines. However online documents and websites offer convenience and efficiency in accessing information, it is important to acknowledge that they may contain incorrect and also unreliable information, which can potentially lead to adverse consequences such as making harmful medical decisions. This is particularly concerning when search engine users rely solely on the information they encounter through search results, without conducting additional research or seeking guidance from qualified medical professionals. Therefore, it is essential to assess the impact of search engines on users’ behavior and decision-making processes, especially when it comes to health-related decisions. Previous research has been conducted to evaluate the extent to which people may be affected by search engine results when they are responding to health-related questions, upon which our study is based (Pogacar et al., 2017; Ghenai et al., 2020). Their findings indicated that individuals tend to make correct decisions when supplied with a series of correct information as search results, and conversely, they tend to make wrong decisions when presented with a group of search results with incorrect information. The prior research studies used a methodology whereby study participants were presented with static search results, without the ability to actively query a search engine. In our study, we designed and conducted a controlled laboratory study which followed a within-subject design that consisted of presenting a group of participants with 12 topics from TREC 2021 Health Misinformation track with each topic comprising a particular health issue and its corresponding suggested medical treatment. These treatments were categorized as either helpful or unhelpful for each health issue, but the participants were not aware of the true effectiveness of each treatment. The participants were then asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the treatments both with and without utilizing the search engine experience provided to them. The search engine environment was established using modern commercial search engine APIs such as Google and Bing as its underlying infrastructure. This approach, unlike previous studies, allowed participants to directly engage with the search engine and submit their own queries to get their desired search results. Our research revealed that search engine results have a substantial impact on individuals, both in terms of positive and negative effects. Significantly, the study participants made more incorrect decisions when they were engaged with topics with unhelpful treatments. Furthermore, it was discovered that there existed a positive correlation between the participants’ level of prior knowledge of health issues and treatments, and their performance in making decisions. One might hypothesize that the results of Pogacar et al. (2017) were due in part of the use of static search result pages rather than a fully interactive search engine, but in our study we found that, even though the participants used a fully interactive search engine, interaction alone was not sufficient for participants to avoid being negatively influenced by the search engine on some search topics

Ephemeral relevance and user activities in a search session

We study relevance judgment and user activities in a search session. We focus on ephemeral relevance—a contextual measurement regarding the amount of useful information a searcher acquired from a clicked result at a particular time—and two primary types of search activities—query reformulation and click. The purpose of the study is both explanatory and practical. First, we examine the influence of different factors on ephemeral relevance and user activities in a search session. Second, we leverage short-term search history and implicit feedback in a session to predict ephemeral relevance and future search activities. The main findings include: 1. As a contextual usefulness measurement, ephemeral relevance differs from both topical relevance judgment and context-independent usefulness assessment. We show ephemeral relevance significantly relates to a wide range of factors, including topical relevance, novelty, understandability, reliability, effort spent, and search task. The difference between ephemeral relevance and context-independent usefulness assessment is linked to judgment criteria, novelty, effort spent, and changes in user’s perceptions of a search result. 2. Ephemeral relevance can be predicted accurately using implicit feedback signals without any manual explicit judgments. We generalize existing implicit feedback methods from using information related to a single result to those based on user activities in a whole session, achieving a correlation as high as 0.5 between the predicted and real judgments. 3. We show choices of word changes in query reformulation and click decisions significantly relate to recent search history, such as the contents and effectiveness of previous search queries, the contents of the results viewed and clicked in previous searches, etc. 4. Leveraging short-term search history in a session and other information, we can predict word changes in query reformulation and click decisions with different levels of accuracies. These findings help disclose and explain the dynamics of relevance and user activities in a search session. The developed techniques provide effective support for developing interactive IR systems

Composite web search

The figure above shows Google’s results page for the query “taylor swift”, captured in March 2016. Assembled around the long-established list of search results is content extracted from various source — news items and tweets merged within the results ranking, images, songs and social media profiles displayed to the right of the ranking, in an interface element that is known as an entity card. Indeed, the entire page seems more like an assembly of content extracted from various sources, rather than just a ranked list of blue links. Search engine result pages have become increasingly diverse over the past few years, with most commercial web search providers responding to user queries with different types of results, merged within a unified page. The primary reason for this diversity on the results page is that the web itself has become more diverse, given the ease with which creating and hosting different types of content on the web is possible today. This thesis investigates the aggregation of web search results retrieved from various document sources (e.g., images, tweets, Wiki pages) within information “objects” to be integrated in the results page assembled in response to user queries. We use the terms “composite objects” or “composite results” to refer to such objects, and throughout this thesis use the terminology of Composite Web Search (e.g., result composition) to distinguish our approach from other methods of aggregating diverse content within a unified results page (e.g., Aggregated Search). In our definition, the aspects that differentiate composite information objects from aggregated search blocks are that composite objects (i) contain results from multiple sources of information, (ii) are specific to a common topic or facet of a topic rather than a grouping of results of the same type, and (iii) are not a uniform ranking of results ordered only by their topical relevance to a query. The most widely used type of composite result in web search today is the entity card. Entity cards have become extremely popular over the past few years, with some informal studies suggesting that entity cards are now shown on the majority of result pages generated by Google. As composite results are used more and more by commercial search engines to address information needs directly on the results page, understanding the properties of such objects and their influence on searchers is an essential aspect of modern web search science. The work presented throughout this thesis attempts the task of studying composite objects by exploring users’ perspectives on accessing and aggregating diverse content manually, by analysing the effect composite objects have on search behaviour and perceived workload, and by investigating different approaches to constructing such objects from diverse results. Overall, our experimental findings suggest that items which play a central role within composite objects are decisive in determining their usefulness, and that the overall properties of composite objects (i.e., relevance, diversity and coherence) play a combined role in mediating object usefulness