With the development of the information technology facilitated tools, patients' participation has greatly changed the health care delivery process. The online information sources have become increasingly so diverse that, both the sources and selection of the health information and the individual’s level of health literacy and e-health literacy have significant implications for people's healthcare decision-making. In one side, the search engine giants lack the effective ways to validate the information, sometimes, even deliberately violate the regulations to publish the faked advertisement or make the advertisement vague to attract the advertisers for the business revenue. In the other side, especially for the incurable patients who cannot get the authoritative treatment information from any other resources have to seek the information online with the glimmer of hope, but the misguidance of the information or the misunderstanding of the information can even cost their lives. So, it is important to explore how the information searching influences the patients' participation for the health delivery process, and how the search engine can do to improve the medical information search for the certain patients.
Search engine in Google and Baidu are studied to explore their information delivery functions for the medical decision-making. It is found that there is the big difference for presenting the advertisements on both search engines. Baidu even adopted another tool called "Baidu Verification" to guarantee the quality of the information. But either the indication of advertisement or the special verification cannot prevent a Chinese young student from being misled to a wrong army hospital with the exaggerated effects on his incurable cancer at the moment. In order to understand and test how the Chinese patients use the searched information on search engines and to see the different influential effects of both Google and Baidu for their decision-makings, Chinese heavy internet users(the average daily usage of internet is more than 2 hours, they have at least the bachelor degree to read English and experience to search information both in Google and in Baidu) are screened to conduct the quantitative research. The screenshots of both search engines are present to get the evaluation of respondents on the information positions of the searched information results, the ways of displaying the searching results, the perception of the information searching results in search engines, the post-reviewing behaviours respectively in two search engines. The significant different assessment will be picked for further studied to draw the generalized conclusion.
Now the surveys are being conducted, and the fieldwork will be finished in one month. As of Aug.1., the drafts of the paper will be ready to be presented.
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