Health knowledge made personal
Sponsored links are just paid advertising - higher bidder gets the better spot which most certainly guarantees that nothing about the order of search results' listings is related to reliability and/or credibility.
Search engines are definitely an enemy of most credible physicians and medical professionals. Patients who introduce themselves to doctors and go right into their speech (usually more of a rant) about what they found on 'WebMD' are almost automatically flagging themselves for trouble.
Why? Because the patients who praise WebMD (or any other source of medical diagnostic/treatment info on the web) as gospel truth are more likely to be problematic to treat. Often times they will challenge any and all treatment with what they read about online, question every single medical decision, and in general just cause problems in the office/hospital. This attitude or mentality many times causes doctors, nurses, any in general any medical staff to treat them differently, sometimes even disregarding the patients concerns to an extent because they are known to exagerate things.
People need to understand that no two medical cases are the same; and that just because their friend or relative was recommended one treatment - does not mean the plan will be the same for them even if given the exact same diagnosis.
Something that everyone should be more aware of is that 99% of anything you read or find online is there to attract business or revenue in some direction. Yes there are many factually originatting webistes/blogs out there that can be quite reliable sources of info but medicine is not something that can be done over the web and the unbiased medical opinion of a licensed professional is infinitely more valuable than the information you can find on the internet (so long as you chose a good doctor).
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Posted by James B.
Searching for health information is the third most popular internet activity. We find so much information online. And there is so much of it out there, that we’re in danger of missing the good stuff amongst the garbage. Some health information is great, but most is ordinary or even dodgy. And much of it is purely product marketing dressed up as something more.
Most people head for a search engine to look for information, which is the first obstacle in finding what you need. Search engines are generally good at giving relevant results, but there is always rubbish in there as well. Search engines aren’t perfect.
Google is the most popular engine by far, because its results are normally good and it’s fast. In ranking websites Google places emphasis on links between same or similar industry websites. A blog about depression that has been linked to by large, reputable mental illness organzations will outrank a similar blog that is popular with large gambling sites. This makes sense for ranking sites by credibility.
I’ll write about Google here because it has such a large share of the market, but the same issues apply to other search engines.
When you type the search term “depression” into Google, you receive a lot of results for reliable sources. The first 10, 20 or 50 appear mostly good. But what about the other 120 million results? Click a few pages forward and the odd website looks a bit dubious, and it goes slowly downhill from there.
But the biggest roadblocks to finding reliable information are at the tops and sides of Google pages. In these positions there are 10 or so results under the subtle gray titles “Sponsored Links”. These are paid advertisements. If you look at the sponsored listings you can see that they are generally sales based. On the front page of my search one of the results is “Depression Free in 3 Minutes”. (LOL). For such a high rank this site will be paying at least $2 a click. It wouldn’t be advertising if it wasn’t making more than $2 per visitor for whatever it is selling.
Call me a fool but it took me years to realize that “Sponsored Links” can be anything, with no implication about reputation or credibility. There will be many others, especially new users, who like me lack this same knowledge. They click and find themselves on a site looking for the promised information, while the seller is taking them by the arm and guiding them towards the transaction tunnel.
Ads like these are now everywhere. They are on newspaper sites, blogs, portals, health sites, anywhere that the site owner wants to make a bit of extra money delivering Google ads to his or her visitors. Web designers blend them into their websites, so the distinction between content and advertising is blurred, even with the subtle “Sponsored Links” displayed somewhere close by. Blah!
Thanks to Dawn at theExperience Projectfor providing the idea and much of the information for this post.