The Role of Information Boxes in Search Engine Results for Symptom Searches: Analysis of Archival Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Search engines provide health information boxes as part of search results to address information gaps and misinformation for commonly searched symptoms. Few prior studies have sought to understand how individuals who are seeking information about health symptoms navigate different types of page elements on search engine results pages, including health information boxes. Objective: Using real-world search engine data, this study sought to investigate how users searching for common health-related symptoms with Bing interacted with health information boxes (info boxes) and other page elements. Methods: A sample of searches (N=28,552 unique searches) was compiled for the 17 most common medical symptoms queried on Microsoft Bing by users in the United States between September and November 2019. The association between the page elements that users saw, their characteristics, and the time spent on elements or clicks was investigated using linear and logistic regression. Results: The number of searches ranged by symptom type from 55 searches for cramps to 7459 searches for anxiety. Users searching for common health-related symptoms saw pages with standard web results (n=24,034, 84%), itemized web results (n=23,354, 82%), ads (n=13,171, 46%), and info boxes (n=18,215, 64%). Users spent on average 22 (SD 26) seconds on the search engine results page. Users who saw all page elements spent 25% (7.1 s) of their time on the info box, 23% (6.1 s) on standard web results, 20% (5.7 s) on ads, and 10% (10 s) on itemized web results, with significantly more time on the info box compared to other elements and the least amount of time on itemized web results. Info box characteristics such as reading ease and appearance of related conditions were associated with longer time on the info box. Although none of the info box characteristics were associated with clicks on standard web results, info box characteristics such as reading ease and related searches were negatively correlated with clicks on ads. Conclusions: Info boxes were attended most by users compared with other page elements, and their characteristics may influence future web searching. Future studies are needed that further explore the utility of info boxes and their influence on real-world health-seeking behaviors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".