Do not try to diagnose yourself using Google

Most of us are guilty of turning to Google when we’re sick or injured in the hope of avoiding that dreaded trip to the doctor’s office or hospital. Unfortunately, these attempts to self-diagnose often end up sending us down a rabbit-hole of misinformation, and can leave us more confused and scared than when we started, reports sciencealert.com.

During an investigation into how search engines can be optimised for health-related queries, a team of researchers at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia found that around 50 per cent of the top 10 results from symptom-related searches are irrelevant.

Google estimates that one in 20 searches, from its roughly 100 billion searches each month, is for health-related information. But more often than not, users don’t get what they’re looking for, says engineer Guido Zuccon from QUT’s Information Systems School. “Our results revealed only about three of the first 10 results were highly useful for selfdiagnosis and only half of the top 10 were somewhat relevant to the selfdiagnosis of the medical

Beware of cyberchondria An unfounded escalation of concerns when you start discovering on the Internet that your mild symptoms are also characteristic of much scarier diseases.

condition,” Zuccon said in a press release.

The QUT researchers surveyed participants to find out what common search terms they might use for a given medical condition. For jaundice, some of the search terms included: “yellow eyes”, “eye illness”, and “white part of the eye turned green”. The researchers used these search terms and analysed the results.

In addition to getting confused and frustrated by the lack of relevant information, Zuccon says it’s also possible for people to experience “cyberchondria” — an unfounded escalation of concerns when you start discovering that your mild symptoms are also characteristic of much scarier diseases.