Seeking Treatment Options: Consumers’ Search Behaviors and Cognitive Activities

As people increasingly search the Internet for health-related topics like treatment options, it is important to understand how they construct their searches, and how they understand the results. In this paper, we report results from an exploratory lab study with 40 cross-sectional participants and follow-up interviews with eleven of them about their use of search engines to find treatment options. While corroborating prior research concerning basic consumer health information search behaviors (e.g., query length and evaluation of results), our findings also extend the current understanding of health information searching by suggesting that the process of seeking treatment options is shaped by consumers’ propensity for familiar and confirming information as well as their desire to seek novel information. Furthermore, our findings suggest an underinvestigated idea of the importance of a search timeline: that is that a consumer is likely to look for confirming or novel information depending on where they are in a particular timeline during their search. The results indicate that search systems can better support consumers in finding novel information about treatment options, but that it would be best to introduce novel information after satisfying consumers search for general and familiar information.