A Perspective on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval- Health Information Searching

The availability of medical domains publicly has made medical information searching a popular type of search on the World Wide Web. However, medical information searchers face many issues and challenges when performing a medical search. The aim of this study is to understand how typical medical searchers (non-medical professionals, medical professionals and medical students) perform medical information searching. Specifically, this research study focuses on how i) task difficulty and ii) topic familiarity affect medical information searching behaviour from a quantitative and qualitative aspect. Results of this research study indicates that classic methods of categorising a searcher based on domain expertise and knowledge are not suitable on an expert type domain instead narrower and more streamlined methods are necessary.