If that headache plaguing you this morning led you first to a Web
search and then to the conclusion that you must have a brain tumor,
you may instead be suffering from cyberchondria.
On Monday, researchers at Microsoft published the results of a
study of health-related Web searches on the company's Live search
engine as well as a survey of its employees.
The study suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine
frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails
them. The researchers said they had done the study as part of an
effort to add features to Microsoft's search service that could make
it more of an adviser and less of a blind information retrieval
tool.
Although the term "cyberchondria" emerged in 2000 to refer to the
practice of leaping to dire conclusions while researching health
matters online, the Microsoft study is the first systematic look at
the anxieties of people doing searches related to health care, said
Eric Horvitz, , an artificial intelligence researcher at Microsoft
Research.
Horvitz said many people treated search engines as if they could
answer questions like a human expert. Horvitz is also a computer
scientist and has a medical degree, and his fellow investigator,
Ryen White, is a specialist in data retrieval technology.
They found that Web searches for things like headache and chest
pain were just as likely or more likely to lead people to pages
describing serious conditions as benign ones, even though the
serious illnesses are much more rare.
The researchers said they had not intended their work to send the
message that people should ignore symptoms. But their examination of
search records indicated that researching particular symptoms often
led quickly to anxiousness. They found that about 2 percent of all
Web queries were health-related and that about 250,000 users, or
about a quarter of the sample, engaged in a least one medical search
during the study.
About a third of the subjects "escalated" their follow-up
searches to explore serious illnesses, the researchers said.
Of the more than 5,000 Microsoft employees who answered a survey
on their medical search habits, more than half said that online
medical queries related to a serious illness had interrupted their
day-to-day activities at least once.
The researchers said Web searchers' propensity to jump to awful
conclusions was basic human behavior that has been noted by research
scientists for decades. In 1974, two psychologists, Amos Tversky and
Daniel Kahneman, wrote a seminal paper about decisions that are
based on beliefs about the likelihood of uncertain events, like the
outcome of an election or the future value of the dollar. They said
people usually employ common-sense rules to aid in decisions. The
rules can be quite useful, but they also frequently lead to
systematic errors in judgment.
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