news & gossip, understanding statistics

Cyberchondria: Old Wine in New Bottles

Susannah Fox | December 2, 2008

Just before Thanksgiving, Microsoft released a study entitled, “Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search.” Ryen White and Eric Horvitz took advantage of a data set that few people have access to (log files from Microsoft’s Live Search engine and MSN Health and Fitness) as well as a survey of 515 [...]