Search Optimization to Prevent Suicide?
April 13, 2008One of the big stories in search this week came from an unlikely source - the BMJ:
Despite recent controversy, no one knows how easy it is to find sites relating to suicide on the internet and what sort of information they contain. Recent studies of internet search behaviour suggest that most people use search engines, that queries are broad—mostly composed of a few words and rarely including Boolean operators or phrase searches, and that users rarely look beyond the first page of results. [1]
Authors of a study at the University of Bristol searched the Internet to study the sort of results a ‘typical searcher’ might find:
We sought to replicate the results of a typical search that might be undertaken by a person seeking information about methods of suicide. We conducted searches using the four most popular UK search engines and 12 broad search terms—a total of 48 searches. The terms entered were those likely to be used by distressed individuals, determined partly from interview data collected in an ongoing qualitative study of near-fatal suicide attempts and by using search suggestions provided by the engines upon entering terms such as “suicide.” The terms used were:
(a) suicide; (b) suicide methods; (c) suicide sure methods; (d) most effective methods of suicide; (e) methods of suicide; (f) ways to commit suicide; (g) how to commit suicide; (h) how to kill yourself; (i) easy suicide methods; (j) best suicide methods; (k) pain-free suicide, and (l) quick suicide. The entire web (not just UK sites) was searched.
The terms were entered into each search engine in turn and we examined the first 10 hits retrieved by each search. In total 480 hits were reviewed. [2]
Sites were then classified into 14 groups ranging from pro-suicide sites offering tips on how to commit suicide through to prevention or support sites.
Just under a fifth of hits (90) were for dedicated suicide sites. Half of these were judged to be encouraging, promoting, or facilitating suicide; 43 contained personal or other accounts of suicide methods, providing information and discussing pros and cons but without direct encouragement; and two sites portrayed suicide or self harm in fashionable terms. A further 44 (9%) hits were sites or pages that provided information about suicide methods in a purely factual (24), partly joking (12), or completely joking (8) fashion. Twelve hits were chat rooms or discussion boards that talked about methods of suicide.
Sites focusing on suicide prevention or offering support and sites forbidding or discouraging suicide accounted for 62 (13%) and 59 (12%) hits respectively. [3]
The authors discuss different ways of controlling access to pro-suicide information, especially for young people, and conclude that
It may be more fruitful for service providers to pursue website optimisation strategies to maximise the likelihood that suicidal people access helpful rather than potentially harmful sites in times of crisis. [4]
This is an interesting issue in terms of search optimization, revolving as it does on key ethical points - access to information that might make a suicide attempt more effective versus freedom of information and privacy arguments.
MSN came out well in regard to access to information, retrieving “the highest number of sites focusing on prevention, support, academics, and policy”[5], while Yahoo and Google, with their generally more successful relevance ranking algorithms, returned more pro-suicide information.
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, the search engine companies say about this issue. It would also be interesting to see if the results were similar in a study searching for information on alcohol and drugs (perhaps also analysing the differences between search results for (legal) alcohol and (illegal) drugs).
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Refs
[1] Lucy Biddle et al. (2008) ‘Suicide and the Internet’ BMJ, 336: 800.
[2] Ibid: 801.
[3] Ibid: 800.
[4] Ibid: 802.
[5] ‘Is the Internet pro-suicide?’ Medical News Today, 10 April 2008.
