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Googling for Health and Fitness
You and your clients probably initiate your Internet searches for health information through a web browser or search engine, such as Google. The search engine identifies dozens, hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of sites to choose from. Sites are then listed according to how well the program thinks the site matches the web surfer’s search criteria. Rarely do people move off of the first page of results they
see; most hits come from the top 10 responses shown by a search engine (Spink & Jansen, 2004). But what is displayed on that first or second page may or may not adequately match what the consumer is seeking. For example, suppose you want to research the merits of high
intensity interval training. You type “high intensity interval training” into Google, and more than 241,000 hits appear (at the time this article was written). However, few or none of the leads on the search engine’s first page include a primary source of in- formation, and most are designed to sell a service or product. One solution is to search in Google Scholar (found under
“more” on Google’s homepage). From there, your search for “high intensity interval training” leads to 123,000 hits (when this ar- ticle was written). This time, however, the first page displays ref- erences to primary sources of information published in major ex- ercise-related research journals. From here, you can better locate the science-based content you’re looking for. Once you’ve selected a website to explore, your next step is to
evaluate that site for indicators of its credibility and/or reliability. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
• Does the information come from a primary source or a secondary source?
• What does the website look like? • Does the website clearly communicate its purpose?
Does the information come from a primary source or a secondary source?
Health-related content on the Net may be categorized as a pri- mary source of information or a secondary source of informa- tion. A primary source refers to original, firsthand information, such as a recorded or transcribed interview with an expert or a research paper published on a journal’s website or online re- search database like PubMed (we’ll cover more about PubMed later in this article). A secondary source offers someone’s inter- pretation of or commentary on a primary source of information. It is important to distinguish between the two so you don’t
mistake someone’s interpretation of primary material for actual facts. To illustrate this point, we’d like to give you an example based on a true story. Suppose you’re searching the web for current fitness-relat-
ed research. You happen upon a report from a reputable media newswire service about a new exercise study. Apparently, re- searchers found that subjects who did just three minutes of ex- ercise a day experienced the same physical benefits as subjects who did 30 minutes of exercise a day! Wow, talk about a time- saving fitness solution. This is quite a claim, so you decide to dig deeper. You find
the study’s abstract online and discover that, in actuality, the researchers had compared two 30-minute trials. There was no three-minute trial – the three-minute claim in the newswire article must have been a typo!
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January/February 2009 Fitness Business Canada 33
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