Internet: Information Acquisition

The Internet has increasingly become a key part of health information searching since the early 2000s, corresponding with the proliferation of health information on the Internet as well as a trend toward a more active health consumer. Online health searches offer many advantages that traditional sources do not provide, as well as several of the same features of the more familiar mass media, library, and personal sources. Internet health information searches can also be conducted on an increasingly broad spectrum of devices (e.g., desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, TV Internet browsers) to allow for personal preference and reduce constraints such as time or location. Academic research related to online health searching has been and continues to be prolific. It is published across a variety of academic ...