Quality-oriented search for depression portals

Abstract

The problem of low-quality information on the Web is nowhere more important than in the domain of health, where unsound information and misleading advice can have serious consequences. The quality of health web sites can be rated by subject experts against evidence-based guidelines. We previously developed an automated quality rating technique (AQA) for depression websites and showed that it correlated 0.85 with such expert ratings. In this paper, we use AQA to filter or rerank Google results returned in response to queries relating to depression. We compare this to an unrestricted quality-oriented (AQA based) focused crawl starting from an Open Directory category and a conventional crawl with manually constructed seedlist and inclusion rules. The results show that postprocessed Google outperforms other forms of search engine restricted to the domain of depressive illness on both relevance and quality. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.