Health Suggestions: A Chrome Extension to Help Laypersons Search for Health Information

Abstract

To help laypeople surpass the common difficulties they face when searching for health information on the Web, we built Health Suggestions, an extension for Google Chrome to assist users obtaining high-quality search results in the health domain. This is achieved by providing users with suggestions of queries formulated in different terminologies and languages. Translations of health expressions might not be obvious and queries in languages with a strong presence on the Web facilitate the access to high-quality health contents. On the other hand, the use of lay terminology might contribute to increase users' comprehension and medico-scientific terminology to obtain more detailed and technical contents. Results show a good acceptance of the suggestions, confirm the utility of a multilingual and multi-terminology approach and show its usefulness to more successful searches.