“Wikipedia articles appear in the top 10 results for more than 70 per cent of medical queries in four different search engines…

…Even more disconcerting is that 50 percent of doctors turn to the user-generated Wikipedia for health info.”

Read the full article at New Scientist.

I wrote a post 18 months ago about using search engines, more specifically Google, to search for health information. Nothing much has changed. The distinction between content and advertising is blurred, and it’s all too easy to end up on a dodgy website.

So who can you trust for reliable information?

A good place to start is to look for the HONcode icon at the bottom of a web page. You will find it in the footer of pages on reputable sites – see for example Psych Central, the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance and the Black Dog Institute. The icon indicates that the site has gone through a certification process for the reliability and credibility of its information. It has become the industry standard for reputable health sites.

Searching for health information is the third most popular internet activity. We find so much information online. And there is so much of it out there, that we’re in danger of missing the good stuff amongst the garbage. Some health information is great, but most is ordinary or even dodgy. And much of it is purely product marketing dressed up as something more.

Most people head for a search engine to look for information, which is the first obstacle in finding what you need. Search engines are generally good at giving relevant results, but there is always rubbish in there as well. Search engines aren’t perfect.

Google is the most popular engine by far, because its results are normally good and it’s fast. In ranking websites Google places emphasis on links between same or similar industry websites. A blog about depression that has been linked to by large, reputable mental illness organzations will outrank a similar blog that is popular with large gambling sites. This makes sense for ranking sites by credibility.

I’ll write about Google here because it has such a large share of the market, but the same issues apply to other search engines.

When you type the search term “depression” into Google, you receive a lot of results for reliable sources. The first 10, 20 or 50 appear mostly good. But what about the other 120 million results? Click a few pages forward and the odd website looks a bit dubious, and it goes slowly downhill from there.

But the biggest roadblocks to finding reliable information are at the tops and sides of Google pages. In these positions there are 10 or so results under the subtle gray titles “Sponsored Links”. These are paid advertisements. If you look at the sponsored listings you can see that they are generally sales based. On the front page of my search one of the results is “Depression Free in 3 Minutes”. (LOL). For such a high rank this site will be paying at least $2 a click. It wouldn’t be advertising if it wasn’t making more than $2 per visitor for whatever it is selling.

Call me a fool but it took me years to realize that “Sponsored Links” can be anything, with no implication about reputation or credibility. There will be many others, especially new users, who like me lack this same knowledge. They click and find themselves on a site looking for the promised information, while the seller is taking them by the arm and guiding them towards the transaction tunnel.

Ads like these are now everywhere. They are on newspaper sites, blogs, portals, health sites, anywhere that the site owner wants to make a bit of extra money delivering Google ads to his or her visitors. Web designers blend them into their websites, so the distinction between content and advertising is blurred, even with the subtle “Sponsored Links” displayed somewhere close by. Blah!

Thanks to Dawn at the Experience Project for providing the idea and much of the information for this post.