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November 1, 2006
Health Web Sites
Hitwise is reporting that Health and Medical websites are the top category for searchers right now. Hmmm. Apparently people start on the web first to check out their health...!
Category Percentage of Traffic from Search Engines (as a proportion of total category traffic)
Period - Week ending October 14, 2006
Category
Percentage of Websites Traffic That Came From Search Engines
Health and Medical
43.51%
Education
41.58%
Food and Beverage
39.90%
Government
31.76%
Community
30.99%
Note - data based on the share of upstream traffic received from Search Engines category among a sample of 10 million US Internet users
Source: Hitwise
Chris Sherman SearchEngineWatch Search Day picks up on this. His analysis is very good and very scary Halloween posting. He quotes the new report from Pew.
The full 21 page PDF report, Online Health Search 2006, can be found on the Pew Internet & American Life Project web site.
His latest is here titled "Rampant Malpractice Among Health Searchers" and the previous one called "Survey: Searchers are Confident, Satisfied & Clueless" is there.
What are we doing in libraries to ensure our services and collections and training address these issues? Should folks trust the web to the extent they do???? Have you weeded the old health and nutrition stuff well? etc. etc.
Stephen
Posted by stephen at November 1, 2006 4:23 PM