Worried patients who search the web for health advice often reject the best sites in favour of those with a human touch, researchers have found.
Despite the boom in online self-help, patients’ search strategies often deny them the best sources of information, such as sites run by drug companies or by NHS Direct.
Research at Northumbria University has identified the factors that get most sites passed by: too much detail, too much advertising, or too general a portal that involves lengthy searching.
Professor Pamela Briggs and her colleagues conducted research, funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council, to discover how internet users identify sites and how they decide whether or not to trust the information that they find on it.
Millions of people