Trust ranking of medical websites

Abstract

The use of the Web as a reference to locate and validate medical information has been growing. A recent report shows that more than 77% of internet users use general purpose search engines, such as Google or Bing, to look up specific diseases, treatments or procedures and that 67% of them believe that the online health information is reliable and trustworthy. However the internet has also become a worrisome source for the propagation of fake online pharmacies, sham hospitals and medical schools. We present a novel method for re-ranking webpages based on the website names in order to not only increase their precision but also their trustworthiness. Our re-ranking approach aims at capturing and returning only those websites that are consistently retrieved across search engines and takes advantage of the fact that the life span of fake websites is relatively short compared to legitimate ones.