MEDICAL INFORMATION PORTALS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF PERSONALIZED SEARCH MECHANISMS AND SEARCH INTERFACES
Andrea Andrenucci · 2006
The World Wide Web has become, since its creation, one of most popular tools for accessing and distributing medical information. The purpose of this paper is to provide indications about how users search for health-related information and how medical portals should be implemented to fit users' needs. The results are mainly based on the evaluation of a prototype that tailors the retrieval of documents from the Web4health portal to users' characteristics and information needs with the help of a user model. The evaluation is conducted through a user empirical study based on user observation and in-depth interviews.