as reported on BBC.
it may be that the search engines are reflecting society’s own prejudices
emphasis added
White, R. W. & Horvitz, E. (2008). Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search. Microsoft Research.
abstract:
The World Wide Web provides an abundant source of medical information. This information can assist people who are not healthcare professionals to better understand health and illness, and to provide them with feasible explanations for symptoms. However, the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure. We use the term cyberchondria to refer to the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web. We performed a large-scale, longitudinal, log-based study of how people search for medical information online, supported by a survey of 515 individuals’ healthrelated search experiences. We focused on the extent to which common, likely innocuous symptoms can escalate into the review of content on serious, rare conditions that are linked to the common symptoms. Our results show that Web search engines have the potential to escalate medical concerns. We show that escalation is associated with the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users, the presence of escalatory terminology in pages visited, and a user’s predisposition to escalate versus to seek more reasonable explanations for ailments. We also demonstrate the persistence of post-session anxiety following escalations and the effect that such anxieties can have on interrupting user’s activities across multiple sessions. Our findings underscore the potential costs and challenges of cyberchondria and suggest actionable design implications that hold opportunity for improving the search and navigation experience for people turning to the Web to interpret common symptoms.
emphasis added
notes and quotes:
great table that breaks down symptom searched for and the likelihood of various causes to come up in search results. In the Health chapter, I write this up like this:
a search for “headache” is as likely to point to “caffeine withdrawal” as “brain tumour” as its cause. The annual incidence rate of brain tumours in the US, where this study was based (although it used the global web as its data pool) is one in ten thousand. And a search for “chest pain”? You’ll more likely discover you’re going to have a heart attack than either indigestion or heartburn.
Of the 515 people they surveyed, they found that the mean number of health related searches their participants performed every month was 10.22. They mostly search for info on symptoms, but almost half search for info on serious medical conditions. 41.7% search for medial diagnoses and 38.1% look for communities with similar conditions.
Most people in their study were pretty balanced about the web. They took what it offered with a grain of salt and didn’t put all their faith into it.
their conclusions:
escalation of medical concerns is potentially related to the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users, the presence of escalatory terminology in pages visited, and a user’s predisposition to escalate or seek more reasonable explanations for ailments
and a recommendation…
Search engine architects have a responsibility to ensure that searchers do not experience unnecessary concern generated by the definitions of relevance and the ranking algorithms their engines use. They must be cognizant of the potential challenges of cyberchondria, and focus on serving medical search results that are reliable, complete, and timely, as well as topically relevant.
hmm.. difficult…
"The experience of losing our ‘net connection becomes more & more like losing a friend"
—
Sparrow, B., Liu, J., and Wegner, D. M. (2011, 5 Aug). Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips. Science, 333(6043): 776-778.
abstract only, tho I have access via LSE.
The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.
emphasis added
Here are my notes & quotes:
Storing information externally is nothing particularly novel, even before the advent of computers. In any long-term relationship, a teamwork environment, or other ongoing group, people typically develop a group or transactive memory, a combination of memory stores held directly by individuals and the memory stores they can access because they know someone who knows that information… The present research explores whether having online access to search engines, databases, and the like, has become a primary transactive memory source in itself.
results from experiment 1: when asked difficult trivia questions, do people think about computers more quickly?
Although the concept of knowledge in general seems to prime thoughts of computers, even when answers are known, not knowing the answer to general-knowledge questions primes the need to search for the answer, and subsequently computer interference is particularly acute.
results of experiment 2: will people only remember keywords when they think they’ll have access to a computer to look up information int he future?
Participants apparently did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statements they had read. Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.
they were more affected about whether they’d be able to look something up later than whether they had to remember it at all.
results of experiment 3: do people remember things better when they know if/where info is saved?
…believing that one won’t have access to the information in the future enhances memory for the information itself, whereas believing the information was saved externally enhances memory for the fact that the information could be accessed, at least in general.
having a search function - on the web or on a computer - means that you won’t use cognitive capacity to remember where you saw it, but knowing something’s been erased will use “memory demands”.
finally, results of experiment 4: do people remember where saved information can be found?
“where” was prioritized in memory, with the advantage going to “where” when “what” was forgotten…This is preliminary evidence that when people expect information to remain continuously available (such as we expect with Internet access), they are more likely to remember where to find it than to remember the details of the item. One could argue that this is an adaptive use of memory—to include the computer and online search engines as an external memory system that can be accessed at will.
and their conclusions:
..processes of human memory are adapting to the advent of new computing and communication technology.
we are learning what the computer “knows” and when we should attend to where we have stored information in our computer based memories. We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found.
and the kicker:
We have become dependent on [our gadgets] to the same degree we are dependent on all the knowledge we gain from our friends and co-workers—and lose if they are out of touch. The experience of losing our Internet connection becomes more and more like losing a friend.
Coverage of the well-publicised article published by Science 5 August 2011, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertip by B
Topic: Serendipity
This has been cross posted from The Guardian’s Technology blog.
Serendipity, the enigmatic process that’s been credited with producing everything from penicillin to the chocolate chip cookie, is the almost-magical convergence of a (happy) accident and the sagacity of knowing what to do with it.
The web has been described by some pundits as “the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture”, and commercial companies - like Google - are looking to harvest your enormous cloud of data to deliver serendipitous experiences before you even know what to search for.
But other pundits have decried the web’s filtering mechanics for reducing serendipity, and potentially stifling innovation rather than creating it.
So who’s right? Is the web a serendipity machine or a tool for cultural homogenisation? Or is it, like so many things, not nearly so black and white?
This fortnight, I tackle a pet topic: what is the web doing for (or against) serendipity.
Send your thoughts to aleks.krotoski.freelance@guardian.co.uk or @ me on Twitter @aleksk. I look forward to being inspired.
Beth Kanter is one of the leading experts on how to create results as a networked non-profit using social media. The seam of rich content on Beth’s Blog is an extraordinary source for charitable organisations who wish to harness the Web for awareness- and fundraising.
In 2008, we interviewed Beth for a feature on how charities could make best use of the web on The Guardian’s Tech Weekly podcast, along with Larry Brilliant of Google.org, the then director of the search engine’s philanthropic arm, and Bill Gates of Microsoft and the Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation.
Editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the Financial Times Lionel Barber, Director of External Relations for Google Peter Barron, BBC Director General Mark Thompson and Anne McElvoy from The Economist join Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman to discuss the role of the professional journalist versus the citizen journalist and the democratisation of news.
