How valuable is medical social media data? Content analysis of the medical web

It is still an open question where to search for complying a specific information need due to the large amount and diversity of information available. In this paper, a content analysis of health-related information provided in the Web is performed to get an overview on the medical content available. In particular, the content of medical Question & Answer Portals, medical weblogs, medical reviews and Wikis is compared. For this purpose, medical concepts are extracted from the text material with existing extraction technology. Based on these concepts, the content of the different knowledge resources is compared. Since medical weblogs describe experiences as well as information, it is of large interest to be able to distinguish between informative and affective posts. For this reason, a method to classify blogs based on their information content is presented, which exploits high-level features describing the medical and affective content of blog posts. The results show that there are substantial differences in the content of various health-relatedWeb resources. Weblogs and answer portals mainly deal with diseases and medications. The Wiki and the encyclopedia provide more information on anatomy and procedures. While patients and nurses describe personal aspects of their life, doctors aim to present health-related information in their blog posts. The knowledge on content differences and information content can be exploited by search engines to improve ranking, search and to direct users to appropriate knowledge sources. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.