Contextualizing consumer health information searching

Abstract

The existing research on consumer health information searching has focused on types of information that users need concerning a particular disease and their querying behavior in general search engines. The context of health information searching, such as people's goals, motivations, and emotions, has received comparatively little attention. Given the significant impact of context on the result of information searching, this study sets out to explore contextual factors of consumer health information searching by analyzing health-related questions that people posted on Yahoo Answers, a social Q&A site. Particularly, we looked at the following factors: linguistic features of the questions that users formulated, their motivations for asking the questions, the time when the questions were asked, and their cognitive representations of the problem space. The results could improve our understanding of consumer health information searching and provide implications for the design of general-purpose health information search engines and consumer health information systems.