International audienceIn France, there are thousands of information sites dedicated to health. Ranging from the simple popularisation of medical facts to institutional sites, including sites for associations of patients and professionals, sites freely available or requiring a free or paid-for access code, medical Net is growing fast. Ranking these information sources is difficult because most of these sites present several of the above characteristics. For example, many of the sites originally intended for healthcare professionals are easily viewed by the public, where scientific articles can be readily found but which cannot be exploited by the layperson. In order to reduce the problems linked to the quality of information found on the internet, the Health ON the Net (HON) Foundation established a quality charter, the Hon Code, for health sites. Moreover, in the medical field the terminology used by authors is complex and each database has its own thesaurus and its own terminology
