Searching for health: the topography of the first page |
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| Authors: | Jill McTavish Roma Harris Nadine Wathen |
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| Institution: | (1) Faculty of Information & Media Studies, The University of Western Ontario, North Campus Building, Room 240, London, ON, N6A 5B7, Canada;; |
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| Abstract: | Members of the lay public are turning increasingly to the internet to answer health-related questions. Some authors suggest
that the widespread availability of online health information has dislodged medical knowledge from its traditional institutional
base and enabled a growing role for alternative or previously unrecognized health perspectives and ‘lay health expertise’.
Others have argued, however, that the organization of information retrieved from influential search engines, particularly
Google, has merely intensified mainstream perspectives because of the growing consolidation of the internet with traditional,
commercial media sources. In this paper we describe an analysis of ‘first page’ results retrieved through Google searches
about several common health concerns, each of which has been the subject of controversy as a result of uncertain aetiology,
diagnoses, outcomes and/or contested approaches to treatment. Our findings suggest that the online search tactics used by
most lay health information seekers produce sources of information that, for the most part, reflect mainstream biomedical
discourses, often linked to commercial interests, rather than a plurality of voices that offer a variety of perspectives and
resources. We discuss the implications for health-interested internet searchers who fail to look beyond the ‘first page’. |
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