Mitigating Information Trust: Taking the Edge off Health Websites

Trusting any information on web is psychosomatic and subliminal by nature. The decision is left on the requestor to assess, judge and corroborate the contents contained in the websites before perceiving it. This is of acute concern when websites deal with sensitive issues like health. There is no standard mechanism that embodies or characterizes how to make these ‘trust’ decisions. Although all the web users make these decisions on a frequent basis, there is no method to comply with the rationale to take such decisions. This paper is an attempt to provide a solution to the problem of ‘how much the content, typically provided by any health related website should be trusted?’ A probing has been done to study the users’ behavior on these websites. This cram makes use of real-time analytical data collected from similarweb.com for hundred health related websites to analyze web users’ behavior. The goalmouth is to develop a novel technique to re-rank search results using TRUST as a deciding factor so that more trustworthy web links appears higher in the results list. The aim is to determine and discern the users’ attitudinal factors that can be captured in practice without user interaction and also capitalize on the quality of the trust estimates. KEyWoRdS Content Trust, Health Information, Medical Trust, Online Interaction, User Satisfaction, Web Trust