Vaccination or Immunization? The Impact of Search Terms on the Internet

Abstract

With steadily rising use of the Internet as a source of health information, public health authorities have expressed concern about the increasing visibility of unscientific information promulgated on the Internet by opponents of childhood vaccination. Searches were made on the four most popular Internet search engines using different combinations of the terms, "vaccination," "immunization," "immunisation," "immunize," "immunise," "vaccine," and "shots." Thirty results were tabulated for each search engine. Searching with the keyword "vaccination" resulted in a significantly higher percentage of antivaccination websites as compared with searches with all other keywords. Of all child-related websites retrieved, the single keyword "vaccination" yielded 40% provaccination sites and 60% antivaccination sites. By contrast, the single keyword "immunization" yielded 98% provaccination sites and 2% antivaccination sites. Using a combination of the words "vaccination" and "immunization" produced results between these two extremes. Thus, any use of the term "vaccination" during an Internet search is likely to expose a parent to a significant amount of antivaccination information. Recommendations are discussed for future research and methods to reduce the impact of misinformation on health consumers using the Internet.

A profile of anti-vaccination lobbying on the South African internet, 2011 - 2013

“…[10,12,15] Because of their apparent credibility, links to these websites abound on anti-vaccination web pages from all around the globe, and the more incoming links to a website, the higher this website is ranked when searching with Google. [16] This phenomenon together with the use of meta tagging is probably the reason behind why these websites appear so frequently in global studies. Anti-vaccination organisations of this type do not seem to exist in SA, so it follows that commercial anti-vaccination web pages have a greater opportunity to rise to the top of the list of web pages found when searches are limited to SA web pages.…”

“…A probable explanation for commercial web pages being so well represented in all studies is that codes written in html (called meta tags, which are not visible in the web page text) are added to more sophisticated web pages to ensure that they are among the first 'hits' when searching using specific terms corresponding with the meta tags. [16] Those who make a living out of selling products/services clearly benefit from increased visibility, and would be more likely to use meta tags than those who are not selling products/services. Also, anti-vaccination lobbying in countries such as the USA is very well orchestrated by a number of sophisticated organisations with websites that often appear official and authoritative.…”

The clinician’s guide to the anti-vaccinationists’ galaxy

“…Instead, groups take on names such as Generation Rescue, Global Research, Moms Against Mercury, SafeMinds, The Informed Parent, the National Vaccine Information Center, Vaccination Liberation, and ChildHealthSafety [19][20][21].…”

Exploring the presentation of HPV information online: A semantic network analysis of websites

“…Prior content analysis used seven of the 10 base terms to locate information about HPV vaccination online [13,18], and the additional three base terms were chosen because they were the most popular HPV vaccine search terms used, based on Google Trends data [19]. Previous research noted the importance of using both vaccination and immunization keywords [8], so these were included as base search terms. Also negative and positive searches were added to the base concepts in line with findings that note negative, neutral, and positive search terms impacts the valence of results [7].…”

“…Much of the information available on the Internet is not verified [6] and the type of information accessed can depend on the search terms employed by the user [7]. Meanwhile, anti-vaccination sites often provides misleading vaccine information [8].…”