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 inf ormation. However, there is no central control and no regulatory policy reg arding publication on the Web. The purpose of this study is to develop and apply published standards to perform a quality evaluation of orthodontic We b sites. Three hundred Web documents were visited and evaluated. The result s indicate a variance of orthodontic information. The more professionally o riented information met more definitive standard criteria; on the contrary, the information designed for the general public met fewer standards.