Quality evaluation of orthodontic information on the World Wide Web.

The phenomenal growth of the Internet has occurred because of the creation of the World Wide Web. The Web stores a huge amount of all sorts of health care information. It poses unlimited opportunities for people to access information. However, there is no central control and no regulatory policy regarding publication on the Web. The purpose of this study is to develop and apply published standards to perform a quality evaluation of orthodontic Web sites. Three hundred Web documents were visited and evaluated. The results indicate a variance of orthodontic information. The more professionally oriented information met more definitive standard criteria; on the contrary, the information designed for the general public met fewer standards.