Consumer Health Search

About this project

This project seeks to assist the general public in using search engines to make well-informed health decisions. While the general public belief that they were being effective in searching for health information online, they were, in fact, relying on incorrect health advise.

This project specifically aims to assist the general public in formulating better health queries, understanding health search results and making well-informed health decisions. See below for a list of relevant publications.

Relevant Publications

Establishing a Reference System for CHS

• Jimmy and Guido Zuccon and Bevan Koopman . 2016. Boosting titles does not generally improve retrieval effectiveness. In Proceedings of the 21st Australasian Document Computing Symposium.

• Jimmy and Guido Zuccon and Gianluca Demartini . 2018. On the Volatility of Commercial Search Engines and Its Impact on Information Retrieval Research. In The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval.

Health Queries Formulation

• Guido Zuccon and Bevan Koopman and Joao Palotti . 2015. Diagnose This If You Can. In European Conference on Information Retrieval.

• Jimmy and Guido Zuccon and Bevan Koopman . 2018. Choices in knowledge-base retrieval for consumer health search. In European Conference on Information Retrieval.

• Jimmy and Guido Zuccon and Bevan Koopman . 2018. Payoffs and pitfalls in using knowledge-bases for consumer health search. In Information Retrieval Journal.

Health Cards

• Jimmy and Guido Zuccon and Bevan Koopman and Gianluca Demartini . 2019. Health Cards for Consumer Health Search. In Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '19).

• Jimmy and Guido Zuccon and Gianluca Demartini and Bevan Koopman . 2019. Health Cards to Assist Decision Making in Consumer Health Search. In Proceedings of AMIA 2019 Annual Symposium.

• Jimmy and Guido Zuccon and Bevan Koopman and Gianluca Demartini . 2019. Health Card Retrieval for Consumer Health Search. In Proceedings of the 28th International ACM CIKM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '19).

Evaluation

• Guido Zuccon . 2016. Understandability Biased Evaluation for Information Retrieval. In European Conference on Information Retrieval.

Search Engines vs Symptom Checkers

• Sebastian Cross and Ahmed Mourad and Bevan Koopman and Guido Zuccon . 2021. Search Engines vs. Symptom Checkers: A Comparison of their Effectiveness for Online Health Advice. In Proceedings of The Web Conference 2021.