Differences in the Effects of Filters on Health Information Retrieval from the Internet in Three Languages from Three Countries: A Comparative Study

We selected twenty search terms on woman's health from various sources and tested them on Google, once with strict filter on and once with filter off. Searches were specified to three countries (Mainland China, Germany, USA), in three languages (Simplified Chinese, German, US English). We found that the proportion of relevant women's health web sites that were blocked was quite high. For the Chinese language web sites originated in China, 72.6% of the blocked web sites were relevant. For the German language web sites originated in Germany, nearly half (49.4%) were relevant. For the US English web sites originated in the US, 95% were relevant. We concluded that people might unknowingly miss potentially important health information due to information filtering.