Abstract :
The rapid development of Web sites providing extensive
coverage of a topic, coupled with the development of
powerful search engines (designed to help users find
such Web sites), suggests that users can easily find
comprehensive information about a topic. In domains
such as consumer healthcare, finding comprehensive
information about a topic is critical as it can improve a
patient’s judgment in making healthcare decisions, and
can encourage higher compliance with treatment. However,
recent studies show that despite using powerful
search engines, many healthcare information seekers
have difficulty finding comprehensive information even
for narrow healthcare topics because the relevant information
is scattered across many Web sites. To date, no
studies have analyzed how facts related to a search
topic are distributed across relevant Web pages and
Web sites. In this study, the distribution of facts related
to five common healthcare topics across high-quality
sites is analyzed, and the reasons underlying those distributions
are explored. The analysis revealed the existence
of few pages that had many facts, many pages that
had few facts, and no single page or site that provided
all the facts. While such a distribution conforms to
other information-related phenomena, a deeper analysis
revealed that the distributions were caused by a
trade-off between depth and breadth, leading to the
existence of general, specialized, and sparse pages.
Furthermore, the results helped to make explicit the
knowledge needed by searchers to find comprehensive
healthcare information, and suggested the motivation to
explore distribution-conscious approaches for the development
of future search systems, search interfaces,
Web page designs, and training
