Zusammenfassung
Loss of privacy and encounters with misinformation are two challenges individuals are likely to encounter in their search for information on the web. These challenges have potential negative impacts, especially in search domains such as health search. Existing information retrieval (IR) systems offer users little (if any) guidance as to how to reduce the likelihood of such negative impacts. The ...
Zusammenfassung
Loss of privacy and encounters with misinformation are two challenges individuals are likely to encounter in their search for information on the web. These challenges have potential negative impacts, especially in search domains such as health search. Existing information retrieval (IR) systems offer users little (if any) guidance as to how to reduce the likelihood of such negative impacts. The sum of these problems provides motivation for experiments to identify elements of existing IR environments that might provide low-cost options to the user for improved search outcomes.
An online user study (N = 90) was performed allowing users to visit search results for 10 medical search tasks adapted from previous research. Analysis was performed on all search results visited in the experiment, with a total of 523 unique web pages collectively visited, with additional analysis performed on a set of 10,000 popular websites. The analysis suggests that the best strategy for users with the goal of protecting their privacy and simultaneously finding more accurate information for their medical search tasks, is to visit websites with .org and .gov in the URL. There is some evidence that HTTP is a useful predictor as well. Existing literature is limited with respect to utilization of these features and thus the findings, along with the annotations, are a key contribution for future research, for which possible directions are provided.
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