Improving Web Searches: Case Study of Quit-Smoking Web Sites for Teenagers

Background: The Web has become an important and influential source of health information. With the vast number of Web sites on the Internet, users often resort to popular search sites when searching for information. However, little is known about the characteristics of Web sites returned by simple Web searches for information about smoking cessation for teenagers. Objective: To determine the characteristics of Web sites retrieved by search engines about smoking cessation for teenagers and how information quality correlates with the search ranking. Methods: The top 30 sites returned by 4 popular search sites in response to the search terms "teen quit smoking" were examined. The information relevance and quality characteristics of these sites were evaluated by 2 raters. Objective site characteristics were obtained using a page-analysis Web site. Results: Only 14 of the 30 Web sites are of direct relevance to smoking cessation for teenagers. The readability of about two-thirds of the 14 sites is below an eighth-grade school level and they ranked significantly higher (Kendall rank correlation, tau = -0.39, P = .05) in search-site results than sites with readability above or equal to that grade level. Sites that ranked higher were significantly associated with the presence of e-mail address for contact (tau = -0.46, P = .01), annotated hyperlinks to external sites (tau = -0.39, P = .04), and the presence of meta description tag (tau = -0.48, P = .002). The median link density (number of external sites that have a link to that site) of the Web pages was 6 and the maximum was 735. A higher link density was significantly associated with a higher rank (tau = -0.58, P = .02). Conclusions: Using simple search terms on popular search sites to look for information on smoking cessation for teenagers resulted in less than half of the sites being of direct relevance. To improve search efficiency, users could supplement results obtained from simple Web searches with human-maintained Web directories and learn to refine their searches with more advanced search syntax.