Variation in Quality of Women’s Health Topic Information from Systematic Internet Searches

Background/Objectives: The internet has unquestionably altered how people acquire health information. Instead of consulting with a medical professional, billions of pages of information can be accessed by anyone with a smartphone. Women’s health issues have been historically and culturally taboo; therefore, internet searches may be particularly useful when researching these topics. Methods: As an exercise in scientific information evaluation, we chose 12 non-cancer topics specific to women’s health, and developed a scoring metric based on quantifiable webpage attributes to answer: what topics generate the highest and lowest scores? Does the quality of information (mean score) vary across topics? Does the variation (score de-viation) differ among topics? Data were collected following systematic searches after fil-tering with advanced features of www.google.com, and analyzed in a Bayesian framework. Results: Mean score per topic was significantly correlated with number of sources cited within an article. There were significant differences in the quality scores across topics; “pregnancy” and “sleep” scored highest, and had more sources cited per page than all other topics. The greatest variation in scores were for “cortisol” and “weight”. Conclusions: Score variation, even with a systematic search suggests that scrutiny is necessary for women’s health information obtained via a search likely to be conducted by a typical internet user. Future work should include review by medical professionals based on their interaction with patients who self-report what they know or think about a con-dition they present, based on information gained from patients’ own internet searching.