Cyberchondria Hits Web Searchers

This is another one of those studies where I would say (insert sarcasm here), "No. You're kidding!" Microsoft has completed a study (.PDF) on how people search for medical information. The report was written by Ryen W. White and Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research.

The conclusion of the report? Much as normal hypochondria, old school fear of diseases which used to be fuel by say TV shows or books, cyberchondria often leads to the conclusion that a searcher has the most unlikely, rare, dire disease possible.

The methodology used in the report spanned three groups:

We retrieved a 40-million page random sample of Web content based on a breadth-first crawl of all categories in the Open Directory Project (ODP) (http://dmoz.org), a human-edited directory of the Web. Following the crawl, for each of three common symptoms (headache, muscle twitches, and chest pain), we compared the co-occurrence statistics for the symptom and the corresponding most likely benign explanations with the co-occurrences of the symptom and serious, but less likely disorders.

Secondly:

We automatically mined the anonymized interaction logs of hundreds of thousands of consenting Windows Live Toolbar users during an 11-month period. The information contained in our logs included a client identifier, a timestamp for each page view, a unique browser window identifier (to resolve ambiguities in determining which browser a page was viewed), and the URL of the page visited.

And, they went internal:

We distributed the survey within Microsoft Corporation to 5,000 randomly-chosen employees. 515 volunteers (350 males and 165 females) who indicated that they searched the Web for health-related information, completed the survey, for a response rate of 10.3%.

One obvious problem with a Web-based search: since we know that search results are ranked, and that most people look at the first set of results, if you see brain tumor for headache instead of caffeine withdrawal, that's where you're going to go in your mind. Makes sense, though, based on typical search user behavior. That's why results are ranked, after all.

Researchers found that roughly 2% of all Web queries are health-related. Within the sample, about 250,000 users (about 25%) engaged in a least one health-related search during the study. About 1/3 then "escalated" with follow-up searches to "dive deeper" into serious illnesses.

Finally, from the survey of 515 Microsoft employees, it's clear most don't think they are hypochondriacs. In fact, over 95% said they did not feel they were hypochondriacs, and about the same said they had never been called hypochondriacs. However, more than half said daily activities had been disrupted at least once after searching and finding information about some obscure disease. Oops.

Why do humans jump to the worst possibility? Well, the simple answer would be that we are basically pessimists. But according to the researchers, this is basic human behavior, documented by researchers for decades.

Clearly, my wife needs to stay away from these type of queries.