Path to Obtaining Health Insurance Information from the Internet: A Preliminary Observational Study

Search terms were formulated and executed on Google to retrieve health insurance information. Search results were then examined to identify those web sites that were health plan web sites, “quote” web sites, “list” web sites (list of quote web sites or health plan web sites), or “other.” 46 search sets yielded 19,578,694 hits. However, only the first 100 hits from each set were included in the final analysis (3,955 sites). Among those, 834 (21.1%) were health plan web sites, 275 (7.0%) were “quote” web sites, and 251 (6.4%) were “list” web sites, while 2,595 (65.6%) were “other” web sites.