Web health info seekers tend not to check sources
October 30th, 2006Ack!
I’ve yet to read the Pew study, but reading this makes me very nervous:
“Pew researcher Susannah Fox said one possible reason why Internet users do not tend to check sources or dates is because of the health Web sites themselves. Only 2 percent of popular health sites display that information on their pages, according to a study by the US Department of Health and Human Services that is scheduled for release soon, Fox said.
Most Web users look for health information with a general search engine such as Google or Yahoo, the study found.
‘The question is whether consumers are doing the best that they can by going to general search engines,’ Fox said.”
The good news? The results of this study indicate that librarians are still SO needed when it comes to research and evaluation of resources. Now, only we could market our skills better…