Mapping Trust in Online Healthcare Ecosystems: A Network Analysis and User-Centric Evaluation

The internet hosts an expansive and diverse landscape of healthcare information, making it essential to assess not only the relevance but also the trustworthiness of such content. This paper presents a network-based exploration of healthcare information dissemination across the web. By employing a focused web crawler and constructing a domain-level hyperlink graph, we analyze the structural properties and interconnectivity of thousands of health-related websites. The study reveals significant disparities in source credibility, the dominance of certain domain types, and the prevalence of influential yet potentially untrustworthy hubs. Furthermore, we conduct two user studies to evaluate the effectiveness of commercial search engines in prioritizing reliable content and to investigate users’ ability to discern credible medical information. The findings highlight critical weaknesses in current search and ranking mechanisms and underscore the need for credibilityaware retrieval systems in the digital health domain.