Human Health and Food Information Language Preferences in online SearchesSciences

The World Wide Web has more than 15 billion pages and has become an important source of health-related information. In the United States, for example, it has been reported that 82% of female users and 77% of male users used the Internet to obtain medical information on a routine basis. Google searches have even been shown to assist physicians in the correct diagnosis of medical ailments. However, two thirds of the pages on the Web are published in English, even though the world has over 5 billion non-English speakers, including approximately 700 million non-Englishspeaking Internet users. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s 6900 living linguistic groups have little Web content available in their language. Adding to this problem, search engines such as Google do not translate search terms into other languages-perhaps a surprise to many users. To overcome linguistic barriers, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) now publish their websites in six and four major languages, respectively. However, other globally authoritative organizations, such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States, primarily publish online information in only one or two languages of domestic importance

Author(s): Sreini Boytsov

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