Ever heard of the term “cyberchondria”? The term emerged in 2000 and refers to the practice of leaping to dire conclusions while researching health matters online.

Recently, Microsoft researchers published the results of a study of health-related Web searches on the company’s Live search engine as well as a survey of the company’s employees. The study suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.
Horvitz, an artificial intelligence researcher at Microsoft Research, said many people treated search engines as if they could answer questions like a human expert. They found that Web searches for things like headache and chest pain were just as likely or more likely to lead people to pages describing serious conditions as benign ones, even though the serious illnesses are much more rare.

They found that roughly 2 percent of all Web queries were health-related, and about 250,000 users, or about a quarter of the sample, engaged in a least one medical search during the study. About a third of the subjects “escalated” their follow-up searches to explore serious illnesses, the researchers said.

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