Surgical informatics on the Internet: any improvement?

The Internet is a popular, but ungoverned, source of medical information. This study tracked the change in performance of commonly available search engines and the quality of medical data therein over a four-year period.

We compared the accuracy of information on a commonly performed surgical procedure (vasectomy) using six standard search engines in a four-year period and with two recently developed search engines. The top 25 ranked sites cited by each search engine were scored for description of the procedure, post-operative instructions, complications and unproven associations.

There was no improvement in quality of individual sites over the study period. Additionally, the hit rate of search engines remained poor with 27 sites cited (40%) in 2002 either irrelevant or unavailable.

Few useful sites with accurate information on surgical procedures are available on the Internet and simple search strategies fail to identify site quality or relevancy.

At present, the Internet cannot be recommended as a reliable resource for many aspects of health information for patients. The onus is on health-care providers to provide high quality sites and direct patients to these sources of reliable information