Surgical informatics on the internet: any improvement?

Purpose: The Internet is a popular, but ungoverned, source of medical information. This study tracked the change in performance of commonly available search engines and the quality of medical data therein over a four-year period. Methods: We compared the accuracy of information on a commonly performed surgical procedure (vasectomy) using six standard search engines in a four-year period and with two recently developed search engines. The top 25 ranked sites cited by each search engine were scored for description of the procedure, post-operative instructions, complications and unproven associations. Results: There was no improvement in quality of individual sites over the study period. Additionally, the hit rate of search engines remained poor with 27 sites cited (40%) in 2002 either irrelevant or unavailable. Discussion: Few useful sites with accurate information on surgical procedures are available on the Internet and simple search strategies fail to identify site quality or relevancy. Conclusion: At present, the Internet cannot be recommended as a reliable resource for many aspects of health information for patients. The onus is on health-care providers to provide high quality sites and direct patients to these sources of reliable information.