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Abstract

The internet is an important source of medical knowledge for everyone, from laypeople to medical professionals. We investigate how these two extremes, in terms of user groups, have distinct needs and exhibit significantly different search behaviour. We make use of query logs in order to study various aspects of these two kinds of users. The logs from America On- line (AOL), Health on the Net (HON), Turning Re- search Into Practice (TRIP) and American Roentgen Ray Society (ARRS) GoldMiner were divided into three sets: (1) laypeople, (2) medical professionals (such as physicians or nurses) searching for health content and (3) users not seeking health advice. Several analyses are made focusing on discovering how users search and what they are most interested in. One possible outcome of our analysis is a classifer to infer user expertise, which was built. We show the results and analyse the feature set used to infer expertise. We conclude that medical experts are more persistent, interacting more with the search engine. Also, our study reveals that, conversely to what is stated in much of the literature, the main focus of users, both laypeople and professionals, is on disease rather than symptoms. The results of this article, especially through the classifer built, could be used to detect specifc user groups and then adapt search results to the user group.

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