Strategic Search Support on Macro and Micro Level

Abstract

Consumers increasingly turn to online resources to get access to medical information. Despite their lack of procedural and domain knowledge, users often have complex information needs. Additionally, incomplete or inaccurate information can negatively affect medical decisions. Existing systems only partially address these problems.This work presents a prototypical implementation of a comprehensive support concept. It aims at giving users, in particular lay people searching for medical information, appropriate assistance on both the strategic and the tactical level while they are trying to solve complex search tasks. The article also describes a series of user experiments conducted as part of a master’s thesis and discusses their results.