research-article

Intentions and attention in exploratory health search

Authors:

Marc-Allen Cartright,

Eric HorvitzAuthors Info & Claims

SIGIR '11: Proceedings of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in Information Retrieval

Pages 65 - 74

https://doi.org/10.1145/2009916.2009929

Published: 24 July 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We study information goals and patterns of attention in explorato-ry search for health information on the Web, reporting results of a large-scale log-based study. We examine search activity associated with the goal of diagnosing illness from symptoms versus more general information-seeking about health and illness. We decom-pose exploratory health search into evidence-based and hypothe-sis-directed information seeking. Evidence-based search centers on the pursuit of details and relevance of signs and symptoms. Hypothesis-directed search includes the pursuit of content on one or more illnesses, including risk factors, treatments, and therapies for illnesses, and on the discrimination among different diseases under the uncertainty that exists in advance of a confirmed diag-nosis. These different goals of exploratory health search are not independent, and transitions can occur between them within or across search sessions. We construct a classifier that identifies medically-related search sessions in log data. Given a set of search sessions flagged as health-related, we show how we can identify different intentions persisting as foci of attention within those sessions. Finally, we discuss how insights about foci dynamics can help us better understand exploratory health search behavior and better support health search on the Web.

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Cited By

Bachl MLink EMangold FStier S(2024)Search Engine Use for Health-Related Purposes: Behavioral Data on Online Health Information-Seeking in GermanyHealth Communication10.1080/10410236.2024.230981039:8(1651-1664)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2024
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Lu QPeng X(2024)Differences in Knowledge Adoption Among Task Types in Human-AI Collaboration Under the Chronic Disease Prevention ScenarioWisdom, Well-Being, Win-Win10.1007/978-3-031-57867-0_16(213-231)Online publication date: 10-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57867-0_16
Chi YThaker KHe DHui VDonovan HBrusilovsky PLee Y(2022)Knowledge Acquisition and Social Support in Online Health Communities: Analysis of an Online Ovarian Cancer CommunityJMIR Cancer10.2196/396438:3(e39643)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2022
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Index Terms

Intentions and attention in exploratory health search
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Information retrieval query processing
    2. Retrieval tasks and goals
      1. Document filtering
      2. Information extraction

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGIR '11: Proceedings of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in Information Retrieval

July 2011

1374 pages

ISBN:9781450307574

DOI:10.1145/2009916

General Chairs:
Wei-Ying Ma
Microsoft Research Asia, China
,
Jian-Yun Nie
University of Montreal, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Yahoo! Research, Spain
,
Tat-Seng Chua
National University of Singapore
,
W. Bruce Croft
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGIR: ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval

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Publication History

Published: 24 July 2011

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SIGIR '11

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SIGIR '11: The 34th International ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in Information Retrieval

July 24 - 28, 2011

Beijing, China

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Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2024.2309810
Lu QPeng X(2024)Differences in Knowledge Adoption Among Task Types in Human-AI Collaboration Under the Chronic Disease Prevention ScenarioWisdom, Well-Being, Win-Win10.1007/978-3-031-57867-0_16(213-231)Online publication date: 10-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57867-0_16
Chi YThaker KHe DHui VDonovan HBrusilovsky PLee Y(2022)Knowledge Acquisition and Social Support in Online Health Communities: Analysis of an Online Ovarian Cancer CommunityJMIR Cancer10.2196/396438:3(e39643)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.2196/39643
Kubb CForan H(2022)Online Health Information Seeking for Self and Child: An Experimental Study of Parental Symptom SearchJMIR Pediatrics and Parenting10.2196/296185:2(e29618)Online publication date: 9-May-2022
https://doi.org/10.2196/29618
Timakum TSong MKim G(2022)Integrated entitymetrics analysis for health information on bipolar disorder using social media data and scientific literatureAslib Journal of Information Management10.1108/AJIM-02-2022-009075:3(535-560)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
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Dosso CMoreno JChevalier ATamine LDemartini GZuccon GCulpepper JHuang ZTong H(2021)CoST: An annotated Data Collection for Complex SearchProceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management10.1145/3459637.3481998(4455-4464)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2021
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Cross SMourad AZuccon GKoopman B(2021)Search Engines vs. Symptom Checkers: A Comparison of their Effectiveness for Online Health AdviceProceedings of the Web Conference 202110.1145/3442381.3450140(206-216)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2021
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Taira KMurayama TFujita SIto MKamide KAramaki E(2020)Comparing Medical Term Usage Patterns of Professionals and Search Engine and Community Question Answering Service Users in Japan: Log AnalysisJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/1336922:4(e13369)Online publication date: 13-Apr-2020
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Bach RWenz A(2020)Studying health-related internet and mobile device use using web logs and smartphone recordsPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.023466315:6(e0234663)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2020
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Ji SGu QWeng HLiu QZhou PChen JLi ZBeyah RWang T(2020)De-Health: All Your Online Health Information Are Belong to Us2020 IEEE 36th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE48307.2020.00143(1609-1620)Online publication date: Apr-2020
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