ABSTRACT
This study was conducted to analyze how appropriate the on-line nutrition information was externally as a web information. Four-hundred-ninety-seven web sites from 5 internet search engines (Yahoo, Empas, Nate, Hanmir, Naver) were selected on the basis of April 25th, 2004. The skillful personnels monitored them about 8 evaluating categories: clarity, purpose, authority, durability, advertisement, privacy and/or security, responsibility, and contents. Forty percent of the selected web sites were operated by the companies which had commercial purpose like internet shopping malls and 5.6% by academies, societies, research institutions, schools/colleges and public institutions. Most of web sites (76.1%) were managed for advertisements and sales of companies' commodities, and 32.6% had the food and nutrition information as first purpose. Ninety-three percent of web sites were targeted to healthy individuals through whole life cycle. Specifically, there were lots of web sites for the obesity which were offered by diet related companies. Of the 497 web sites, 193 mentioned the name providing the nutrition information, but only 1/3 had reliability on their specialty. As a source of nutrition information, 52.7% of web sites were using 'books of the major field' and 42.0% 'newspapers' and 23.7% 'broadcasting', respectively. Most web sites mentioned 'setting-up date' but not 'renewal date'. Thirty-six percent of web sites took '2 - 3 days' for the operators to answer the questions through the bulletin. Forty-seven percent of web sites answered '1 - 10 questions' per 1 week, but 40.1% of them didn't answer for a week at all. There were 118 web sites (23.7%) to record the connected frequencies and 36.0% of them put the advertisements. Around 96% of web sites mentioned feedback addresses. Among the menus of web sites, 68.0% were about self-advertisement and 64.0% about nutrition information. Each web site was scored to judge its external quality according to the operators by selecting 13 items. Web sites managed by public institution had highest scores (9.5), and lowest in private vendors', food companies' and individual web pages. Among search engines, Naver got the highest score of 7.0 and Nate the lowest one of 6.1. As it was only the pilot study, there were several limits in evaluating tools, time and monitored quantity. To make monitoring of on-line nutrition informations actively, standardized monitoring forms might be developed under the integrated studies.