Do you have cyberchondria? Are you always googling what’s hurting today to figure out what you have and coming up with a new fatal disease every new day? For example, when you searched for headaches did you see all the articles about brain tumors or find the ones about caffeine withdrawal? Although the chance of having a brain tumor is small, you probably found those articles first.

Well, you’re not alone. A recent study of more than 500 Microsoft employees who answered a survey on their medical search habits revealed that more than half said that online medical queries related to a serious illness had interrupted their day-to-day activities at least once. In the study on cyberchondria the researchers examined how medical searches can be made to give more relevant results. Health information professionals should try to create search engines that are able to detect medical queries and offer advice that did not automatically make Web searchers fear the worst.