WEB-BASED INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Title of Article: Google vs. HealthAtoZ: the health care resource needs of the layperson
Author: Alisa F. Haggard
URL: http://www.unc.edu/ ~ahaggard/inls181/search.html

Abstract:

The topic was an evaluation studies of two search engines used by the layperson in a web search about thyroid cancer. The layperson knows the basics of computer use and web-surfing and is searching for answers to the following questions: What are some of the possible causes of the disease? What diagnostic tests are used to determine if someone has thyroid cancer, and how accurate are they? What are the treatment options? And what is a person’s prognosis following diagnosis?

The engines used for evaluation were google.com , a widely used search engines claiming to have access a billion web pages and healthAtoZ., a search site created by healthcare providers which retrieves from it’s own reviewed directory, as well as sending out a “web spider” to search documents in the internet.

The result of the evaluation was google.com has the most number of documents returned 2,590,000 and 5,034 for healthAtoZ ; speed of search was 0.44 seconds for google and fast, but not specified for the other engine ; more relevant results for the first engine and not particularly for the 2nd engine ; accessibility and usability of help menu , was no where to be seen for google and sometimes hard to find for healthAtoZ ; understandability to lay person , ability to set preferences and advanced search capabilities were yes to google.com and no to healtAtoZ.com

Three things I learned from my reading assignments:

1. learned the different criteria used in evaluating the two search engines
2. aware that google.com is user friendly and meet the needs of the target
audience better than the specialized health search engine healthAtoZ
3 healthAtoZ has links like PubMed, National Library of Medicine, not very
appropriate for layperson

Implications on me and my work:

The NKTI medical library also accommodates husbands, wives, and relatives of patients diagnosed of different kidney diseases seeking further information. Doctors are very busy and some are reluctant to often ask the doctors about the conditions of the patients. They prefer to come to the library and do the searching. The researchers are laypersons and found out the medical books and journals very difficult to understand. Google.com is one search engine I will recommend to my patrons seeking further information regarding diseases to their relatives undergoing dialysis, transplantation, lithotripsy, etc