Misbeliefs and Biases in Health-Related Searches

Abstract

Quality of search engine results returned to health-related questions is very critical, since a searcher may directly trust any suggestion in the top results. We analyze search questions that mention diseases / symptoms and remedies that are potential health-related misbeliefs. Using lists of medical and alternative medicine terms, we extract health-related search questions from 1.5~billion questions submitted to Yandex. As an initial study, we sample 30 frequent questions that contain a disease--remedy pair like "Can hepatitis be cured with milk thistle?". For each question, we carefully identify a ground truth answer in the medical literature and annotate the top-10 Yandex search result snippets as confirming the belief, rejecting it, or giving no answer. Our analysis shows that about 44%~of the snippets (that users may simply interpret as definitive answers!) confirm some untrue beliefs and are wrong, and only few include health risk warnings about using toxic plants.