A graph-based analysis of medical queries of a swedish health care portal

Abstract

Today web portals play an increasingly important role in health care allowing information seekers to learn about diseases and treatments, and to administrate their care. Therefore, it is important that the portals are able to support this process as well as possible. In this paper, we study the search logs of a public Swedish health portal to address the questions if health information seeking differs from other types of Internet search and if there is a potential for utilizing network analysis methods in combination with semantic annotation to gain insights into search behaviors. Using a semantic-based method and a graph-based analysis of word co-occurrences in queries, we show there is an overlap among the results indicating a potential role of these types of methods to gain insights and facilitate improved information search. In addition we show that samples, windows of a month, of search logs may be sufficient to obtain similar results as using larger windows. We also show that medical queries share the same structural properties found for other types of information searches, thereby indicating an ability to re-use existing analysis methods for this type of search data.