Characteristics and Web Genres of Health-Related Websites

Introduction: This paper explores some general features of health-related websites in Hungary and also aims to investigate the typical web genres represented by examining a corpus of 50 web pages.
Material and method: The most prominent categories of health related and medical websites were summarized and compared to a survey in Romania in 2010. To answer questions about the web genres associated with the purpose of health, a corpus was constructed and analyzed based on the lists of a Hungarian web directory. The web pages in the sample were classified into specific genres.
Results: The most common categories in the health section are alternative medicine, lifestyle issues, services and dental health. The results suggest that commercial and educational sites dominate this field. Besides organizational and business homepages, the use of topical homepages is characteristic and other genres appear embedded in the texts, like Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) reports, newsletters, discussion forms and articles.
Conclusions: Genre analysis can be applied to the specific context of digital documents. The study of genres is essential in describing the language use of the Internet and the results suggest that some web genres are more represented for providing health related information than others.