Microsoft researchers recently published the finding of a study looking at health-related web searches using the Live search engine and the company’s employees.

The research indicates that self-diagnosis by a search engine often leads to the worst conclusion by individuals about their health.

The idea behind the study was to add features to Microsoft’s search service to make it more of a helper and less a generic information retrieval service.

The term “cyberchondria” first emerged in the year 2000, but this was the first systematic study examining people’s anxieties about their health and how they research the topic.

The researchers found that searches for conditions such as chest pain or headache would lead people to websites describing serious conditions more often than sites describing less serious conditions, even if the serious illnesses are significantly more rare.

They also found that 2% of all web searches were health-related and about a quarter of the study sample conducted at least one medical query during the study. About a third of the participants heightened their search to more serious medical conditions.

This type of search escalation has been noted as a common human behavior, also documented in other studies for decades.

The researchers noted that the judgments people make about the severity of their health status correlates with how individuals rank their web search results.