Assessment of the malnutrition related information on the internet

Technological development has made the health information easily accessible to the general community through the internet. The number of health information seekers is increasing gradually and there is sufficient evidence indicating its usefulness in informed decision making. The objective of the study is to evaluate the quality of malnutrition related information on the internet by using different search engines.

The three search engines: Google, MSN/Bing, and Yahoo were used to search malnutrition related information. The general assessment tool and content assessment tool were adopted to evaluate the quality of the included websites from different groups such as .org, .com, .gov, and others. The analysis was performed by using SPSS 17.0.

Of all 29 sites, the .gov group showed the highest score for general assessment (mean=317; SD=14.68) and content assessment (mean=51.5; SD=18.26). The .org group got the lowest scores for both the tools. Reliability was 57% among rater1 and rater2 for the general assessment tool while it was 51% between rater2 and rater3 for content assessment.

The study produced a quality assessment of websites containing malnutrition information. Sites provided more information on etiology, clinical information, and available treatment option for malnutrition. Assessment tools that were used in the study were good, extensive in assessing both surface and content quality.