Nutritional information on the Web: An analysis of information sought and information provided

Whether users searching for nutrition related information on the Web find the information they desire in investigated here. This analysis may provide a better understanding of the nutrition information needs Web users and the design of useful nutritional knowledge bases. Nutrition related queries from users of the Excite search engine were posed to a number of nutrition Web sites in order to assess whether or not topical matches were found. The queries were also submitted to Excite and Google, two general-purpose search engines. Surrogate users were used to assess the actual relevance of topical matches. Matches were retrieved for about 36% of the queries on the nutrition sites. For the general search engines, matches were retrieved for about 92% of the queries. Most of the matches in both cases were judged relevant.